TRINAMIC Motion Control's TMC8461 and TMC8462 full EtherCAT slave controllers are optimized for real-time response

     TRINAMIC Motion Control extends its dedicated EtherCAT slave controller integrated motor control peripheral ic product portfolio. The TMC8461 and TMC8462 are the world's first EtherCAT slave station controllers with 24 V high voltage I/ o and two integrated switch regulators. In addition, the TMC8462 has two additional integrated Ethernet PHYs for minimizing board space. Both ics eliminate latency by incorporating PWM and step/dir I/O peripherals that make routing through the application processor firmware redundant, making it ideal for Industrial Internet of Things, automation, and other applications that require real-time response.

     EtherCAT extends the feature set of the EtherCAT core technology with a wide range of peripherals and features from the controller. Integrated smart peripheral blocks, accessible from MCU or EtherCAT hosts, can be mapped directly to process data object (PDO) SPI host and encoder interface via memory manager in addition to PWM unit and step/dir interface. This unique SPI interface enables the DAC to be read or written from the ADC or encoder without delay.

     The IC includes a standalone mode so that the integrated peripherals map directly to the bus register, while the parallel external MCU can perform higher-level protocol operations. To ensure broad interoperability, the TMC8461 and TMC8462 communications hardware has been proven to be 100% compatible with existing Beckhoff EtherCAT slave controllers through extensive interoperability testing.

     Like all Trinamic devices, ICs benefits from the company's integrated development ecosystem, called "Landungsbrucke." This includes evaluation boards, reference designs, and sample EtherCAT Cortex mcu software stacks for TMC8461 and TMC8462 devices. All configuration and parametric tools are incorporated into Trinamic's integrated development environment (IDE). These devices can be used with any MCU with SPI or independently in SPI emulation mode.TMC8461-BA comes in a BGA144 (10 x 10) pack and TMC8462-BA comes in a small BGA121 (9 x 9) pack. The equipment meets automotive grade temperature specifications from -40°C to +125°C.