This year’s SPS IPC Drives trade show which ran from November 26 – 28 in Nuremberg, Germany held a significant milestone for the EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG): it has now been 10 years since the organization first began its activities at the 2003 SPS IPC Drives show with 33 official founding members. Almost in perfect timing with this 10 year anniversary, the ETG recently reached yet another milestone: the Chinese machine manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. has become the 2,500th member of the ETG. Sany is a major manufacturer of mobile machines, an area in which EtherCAT technology has gained traction during the past year.
In addition to the ETG organization’s 10 year anniversary at SPS IPC Drives 2013, EtherCAT celebrated its 10th anniversary as a technology earlier in the year at Hannover Fair 2013. Since the foundation of the ETG in November 2003, the organization has held a strong belief that everyone should be able to use and implement EtherCAT. Looking to the future of the organization, the EtherCAT Technology Group team plans to continue opening up new regional and vertical markets.
Martin Rostan, Executive Director of the EtherCAT Technology Group, explains: “The remarkable success of the past 10 years shows that we were right with our strategy and could even convince entire industries to standardize on EtherCAT. The semiconductor manufacturing industry, for example, made its decision in favor of EtherCAT as a system bus for a new generation of silicon wafers. On a regional level we also achieved significant results: In Japan, for example, EtherCAT is the only fieldbus technology that is not from Japan but has still succeeded as a de facto standard there.” From a technical point of view, the ETG will continue expanding with further device profiles that will result in even more manufacturer-independent interfaces.
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