TMC8461

EtherCAT Slave Controller with Latency free advanced I/O peripherals

TMC8461 is a EtherCAT slave controller IC with integrated, jitter-free realtime motion-control peripherals.

TMC846x are the first EtherCAT slave controller ICs to incorporate PWM and Step/Dir I/O peripherals that do not require routing through the firmware of an application processor, eliminating latency for applications requiring real-time response. The TMC846x extends the feature set of the core EtherCAT technology with a broad array of peripherals and features: an integrated smart peripherals block accessible from an MCU or EtherCAT master and, in addition to a PWM unit and Step/Dir interface, an SPI master and encoder interface that can be directly mapped to the PDO (Process Data Object) by the memory manager. This unique SPI interface enables latency-free read from an ADC or write to a DAC.

The ICs includes a standalone mode that enables direct mapping of integrated peripherals to bus registers, while in parallel an external MCU can perform higher layer protocol operations. To enable wide interoperability, the TMC8461 communication hardware has been verified as 100% compatible with the existing Beckhoff EtherCAT Slave controller through extensive interoperability testing.