to EtherCAT, reducing further investment costs. Thanks to the performance of EtherCAT, communication with external fieldbus masters is as fast as with traditional cards connected via PCI or other backbone buses. Since decentralized fieldbus interfaces lead to shorter extensions, they can be operated with even higher baud rates than would have been possible with the traditional architecture. Implementation EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) encourages and expects companies that develop EtherCAT products to join ETG, so that they can get an EtherCAT Vendor-ID, get access to the full documentation, to the developers forum and to the slave stack code, that Beckhoff provides free of charge to ETG members. Master Masters can be implemented as a software solution on any Ethernet MAC. Different manufacturers provide code for different operating systems, including several open-source projects. Due to the relocated mapping on the slave hardware, demands are reduced for CPU performance of the master. The master already contains the data as a readily sorted process image. In order to operate a network, the EtherCAT master requires the cyclic process data structure as well as boot-up commands for each slave device. These commands can be exported to an EtherCAT Network Information (ENI) file with the help of an EtherCAT configuration tool, which uses the EtherCAT Slave Information (ESI) files from the connected devices. Slave Contrary to the operation of standard Ethernet, the slaves process the EtherCAT frames on the fly. This requires the use of hardware-integrated EtherCAT Slave Controllers (ESC) in the slaves. ESCs are also available as ASICs or based on FPGAs. Since the beginning of 2012, standard microprocessors with EtherCAT slave interfaces are also available. For simple devices, no additional microcontroller is required. In more complex devices, however, the communication performance of EtherCAT is nearly independent of the performance of the used controller. Thus the requirements for the microcontroller are determined by the local application, e.g. the drive control. There is a choice of development boards, both from the EtherCAT Slave Controller suppliers and from third party vendors. There are also open-source projects for EtherCAT slave device development boards, such as SOES and ArduCAT. Control and regulation For the control and regulation of physical processes, high data integrity, data security, and synchronicity is required. EtherCAT has been designed especially for these kinds of applications and meets all demands for fast controls. Measurement systems Modern measurement systems are characterized by multi-channeling, synchronicity, and accuracy. Due