Device profiles
CANopen device and application profiles are available for a wide range of device classes and applications, ranging from I/O components, drives, encoders, proportional valves and hydraulic controllers to application profiles for plastic or textile machinery. EtherCAT can provide the same communication mechanisms as the familiar CANopen mechanisms: object dictionary, PDO (process data objects) and SDO (service data objects), and even the network management is comparable. EtherCAT can thus be implemented with minimum effort on devices equipped with CANopen. Large parts of the CANopen firmware can be re-used. Objects can optionally be expanded in order to account for the larger bandwidthIn computer networking, bandwidth often refers to a data rate measured in bits/s, for example, network throughput. The reason for the connection of data rate with the term bandwidth is that the limit to the data rate of a physical communication link is related to its bandwidth in hertz offered by EtherCAT.
Figure 5-56: Several Device Profiles and Protocols can coexist