In Germany, a company called Beckhoff Automation proposed a radical solution. They didn't want to just use Ethernet; they wanted to reinvent how it traveled. They called it .
Based on CANopen DS301:
The industry relied on old fieldbus systems (like Profibus or DeviceNet). They were reliable but slow, like dirt roads trying to handle Formula 1 traffic. Engineers looked at standard office Ethernet—the technology powering the internet—as a savior. It was fast (100 Mbps) and cheap. ethercat
This makes it the dominant choice for where deterministic latency matters more than raw bandwidth. Its weakness is the requirement for specialized slave hardware and a real-time capable master – but in return, it scales from a handful of I/O points to thousands with consistent, predictable timing. In Germany, a company called Beckhoff Automation proposed
Each datagram contains:
For 64 digital inputs (8 bytes), standard UDP/IP would use 42+ bytes overhead; EtherCAT uses ~14 bytes overhead + 2 bytes per datagram. Net data rate can exceed 90% of 100 Mbit/s. Based on CANopen DS301: The industry relied on