Sercos International (www.sercos.com), has proudly introduced the Sercos EasySlave, which is an FPGA-based single-chip controller ideally suited for simple Sercos III slave devices, at the recently concluded SPS/IPC Show in Nuremberg, Germany.

Featuring a real time channel with a single input and output connection, the EasySlave can support cycle times as low as 31.25 usec.

Meanwhile, an IP core serves as a netlist for the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family. The core contains all of the Sercos slave connection’s functions, including the related software library for I/O devices.

“Sercos EasySlave can be integrated in an application with minimal effort in order to achieve various I/O activations,” said Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International.

EasySlave’s technical support is provided bySteinbeisTransferCenterfor Systems Technology (TZS). In addition, TZS provides an EasySlave evaluation kit that offers customers an easy and quick introduction to the Sercos slave development. The kit comes with a development board based on a Xilinx Spartan-6 XC6SLX9 FPGA. Using plug-in modules, the evaluation kit, which includes all other required documents and materials (power supply, Ethernet cable and documentation), can also be extended.

“The EasySlave evaluation kit makes Sercos III slave development easy. Steinbeis-TZS will be happy to provide assistance in the integration and commissioning of EasySlave,” noted Professor Reinhard Keller of Steinbeis-TZS.

Sercos International offers various EasySlave licensing models. Aside from the special prizes provided to Sercos member companies, a license-free bitstream IP core version with a limited functionality is also offered, under the product name EasySlave-IO.