Frank Iwanitz, Softing AG and Stefano Zammattio, Altera Corp.

FPGAs and the Industrial Ethernet Maze

Today, there are more than 25 Ethernet-based industrial communication systems that co-exist in the market. Vendors of industrial devices need to create solutions to optimally support multiple RTE (real-time Ethernet) protocols within a single hardware platform, and that can be field-upgraded to support new versions of existing protocols, or even completely different protocols, without replacing...