In recent years the trend in industrial automation has seen high performance networking of distributed drives and motion controllers becoming much more common.

Technologies from the IT world are being increasingly used in industrial automation applications, one such standard is Ethernet.

Some complex industrial automation tasks require hard real-time. However, conventional fast Ethernet switches are not capable of delivering data fast enough for motion control applications.

NEC Electronics' new ERTEC devices give the opportunity to have one Ethernet Switch to handle all the Ethernet traffic both conventional and real-time.

In order to cover the requirements of automation to their full extent, the PROFINET standard specifies real-time features at two levels, Real-time (RT) and Isochronous Real Time (IRT).

Using standard Ethernet switches RT performance can be obtained but to get reaction times well below 1 millisecond IRT must be running and this is where the ERTEC devices come into their own.