Design of an industrial Ethernet based embedded open architecture CNC system

Abstract

In order to promote the high frequency performance of open architecture CNC system, an embedded CNC controller combining FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology and real-time Ethernet communication bus was designed, which consisted of an embedded ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) processor and an FPGA. An open source CNC software running under Linux operating system was customized to accommodate the ARM processor, in which interpolation and motion control modules were implemented in FPGA for better real-time performance. Meanwhile, the FPGA also acted as the master node communicating with servo drivers via EPL (Ethernet Powerlink) network. The EPL stack was implemented with a Nios II soft processor in the FPGA. Experimental results have shown that the designed system worked properly.