POWERLINK is the world's most widely used Industrial Ethernet protocol in applications where plant productivity depends on fast axes and machine and sensor data is transmitted in hard real time. In the year 2010 alone, more than 100,000 new axis systems with POWERLINK interfaces were put into operation.
“This success is founded on POWERLINK's performance in motion control networks,” explains Anton Meindl, CEO of the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group (EPSG). “In machines with 24 axes and in I/O stations with 110 digital and 30 analog I/O channels, POWERLINK provides a drive-to-drive reaction time of less than 250 µs. One extreme example of POWERLINK's performance is a machine in a pharmaceutical application with more than 500 axes. POWERLINK's open source license and the support given to developers and users by the user organization EPSG are additional competitive advantages.”
