fido5000: One Chip,

Many Ethernet Protocols

Thomas Brand

Analog Devices, Inc.

Introduction

Nowadays, particularly in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things

(IIoT) or Industry 4.0, many suppliers and manufacturers of industrial

automation technologies are longing for an open, manufacturer-independent

communication platform. Thus, manufacturers expect system-wide

realizations of the increasing amount of automation processes. In conse-

quence, the automation must take the needs of IT systems into account

with regard to open data access, as well as the real-time requirements

of industrial control systems. Ethernet and industrial Ethernet have already

played an important role here. The numerous advantages of this network

technique, such as efficient and synchronous transmission of large data

amounts on a shared transmission medium, are superior to those of con-

ventional fieldbuses. Popular industrial Ethernet protocols like PROFINET,

the same Ethernet medium with conventional protocols like http or TCP/IP.

In this article, the requirements of industrial networks (for example, reliable

data delivery and time synchronization of data) are considered in more

detail. In addition, the fido5000 REM switch from Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI)

will be presented as a possible product solution. This chip is available as

fido5100 and fido5200 variants, with both variants differing only in the

Ethernet protocols they support. The fido5100 supports the major indus-

trial Ethernet protocols except EtherCAT, while the fido5200 supports the

major industrial Ethernet protocols including EtherCAT.

The fido5000 REM Switch

With the fido5000, Analog Devices offers a real-time Ethernet, multiproto-

col (REM) switch chip with two Ethernet ports. Hence, two ports become

today’s industrial devices and future Industry 4.0 applications must

support popular network topologies like line and ring topologies, as well

as star topologies. In addition, it is possible to connect any host processor

so developers have the possibility to use their own processors, as well

as their preferred development environments. All these possibilities and

features of the fido5000 are shown in the Figure 2.

Figure 1. The fido5200 REM switch as a variant of the fido5000. fido5200 supports

the major industrial Ethernet protocols, including EtherCAT.

The communication between the REM chip and the processor works via

memory bus in order to implement high performance, low latency/low

jitter industrial Ethernet. The memory bus also provides the host interface

by ADI and consists of a hardware/software combination. It ensures in-

time processing of critical data from an Ethernet network, independent

of its protocols and network utilization, so there is no interference from

nontime-critical data traffic. This means that data from the real-time

channel has higher processing priority than normal network data. This

PriorityChannel technology is shown in Figure 3, which shows four

queues that give the possibility to do fine adjustment when processing

real-time data.

RAM

Flash

CPU or

SoC

fido5200

Industrial Field Device or Controller Application

PHY

PHY

Application

I/O

Industrial Ethernet

Network

Network and Topology



LLDP



IGMP



MRP



HSR



DCP



DHCP



MRPD



PRP



VLAN



Aging



DLR



RSTP

with PriorityChannel

Technology

Any Protocol

Any Stack

Any Processor



fido1000



QoriIQ



XMC





Etc.

Figure 2. Overview of fido5000 features.

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