November 18, 2014 - Sercos International, provider of the Sercos automation bus, announced today the availability of the Sercos III IP Core for Altera’s low-cost, low-power Cyclone V devices. The IP core is available for Sercos III master and slave controllers (SERCON100M/S). It includes all hardware functions, such as timing, synchronization and processing of cyclic and non-cyclic data on the basis of two integrated Ethernet MACs. Sercos III master and slave devices can be implemented as a single chip solution using either Cyclone V FPGAs or Cyclone V SoCs, which integrate an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor.
“The on-going use of the flexible and continually developing FPGA technology brings significant cost and performance benefits to the Sercos community”, said Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International e.V. “Using Altera’s Cyclone V FPGA and SoC devices to implement a single-chip embedded Sercos III Industrial Ethernet Protocol with integrated PLC and motion control functionality enables faster time-to-market and significant performance advantages at a low cost for our factory automation customers“, said David Moore, Director for the Industrial Business Unit, Altera Corporation. Detailed documentation on the IP core, reference designs and example Ethernet interface diagrams are available from Sercos International.
Technical support and customer-specific design services are provided by Cannon-Automata, Ried/Germany and Caronno, Pertusella/Italy. "Cyclone V FPGAs and SoCs facilitate a broad range of new application areas. The Cyclone V SoC, with its integrated ARM processor, delivers significant performance improvements for computing-intensive applications. For example, complete Sercos master devices can be implemented in the form of a single-chip solution", says Christoph Melzer, Managing Director of Cannon-Automata.
About Sercos International
Sercos International is an association of users and manufacturers that is in charge of technical development, standardization, certification and marketing for the Sercos automation bus. Conformance tests guarantee that Sercos implementations are standard-compliant ensuring that devices from different manufacturers can be combined. Based in Germany, the organization presently has more than 90 member companies located around the world and has national liaison offices in North America and Asia.
About Sercos
The SErial Realtime COmmunication System, or Sercos, is one of the world’s leading digital interfaces for communication between controls, drives and decentralized peripheral devices. Sercos has been used in machine engineering for approximately 25 years and is implemented in over 4 million real-time nodes. With its open, manufacturer-independent Ethernet-based architecture, Sercos III is a universal bus for all automation solutions.