EtherNet/IP over sercos

Actually it could be almost any application layer placed on top of the sercos realtime Ethernet fieldbus. Bosch Rexroth’s Dr Ludwig Leurs referred to a proposal entitled ‘Single wire coexistence of sercos and EIP’ but I think that everyone will get the general idea. And it is a good one.

sercos III looks like a giant shift register from both a topological and logical view. A regularly clocked series of Etherframes originating at the master controller step their way down the chain of slave controlled nodes on one of the Ethernet physical layer pairs with answering frames sent back to the master on the other physical layer pair. In other words, full TDMA using the duplex nature of 100Mbps Ethernet to create a linear ‘ring’.

(Frank Ogden, Industrial Ethernet Book, October 2012)