Delta Tau Tales of Motion Control Episode 17: The Power PMAC is a CAT with Extra Lives

The Power PMAC from Delta Tau is a CAT that can live alongside a great number of motor drives from many other suppliers. This means a variety of apparently disparate motor drives can be linked on a common network, and it also controls any other I/O at the same time. In fact, Power PMAC forms the EtherCAT Master removing the need for separate motion control and network controllers.

EtherCAT is increasingly a widely used open, high performance, Ethernet based fieldbus system that supports a huge range of devices with a broad range of protocols. The EtherCAT protocols supported by Power PMAC include:

•     Coe, Foe and Eoe
•     Coe DS402 specification for drives
•     Cyclic drives in Position, Velocity and Torque modes

The innovative Power PMAC is a seventh generation motion controller combining unprecedented speed and accuracy with ultra high bandwidth for sub-nanoscale motion precision.

It is therefore possible to control up to 256 axes from a single card with a unique 64-bit hardware floating point processor that delivers breathtaking processing speeds. It is important to note that speeds can be achieved in orders of magnitude better than other competitors motion controllers. In one custom servo programme test, processing time was slashed from 588µs to just 1.6µs. In addition there is also the capability to control up to 32 co-ordinated axes.

High-speed integrated communications aids precision machine implementation and control, here again a custom test showed an improvement from 4.0s to 220ms.

New memory configurations enable extremely fast access rates and the Power PMAC includes not only error checking but importantly error correction which is a vital new feature for complex motion algorithms.
Other standard features include powerful PLC functionality; a web server interface as standard; USB and SD card interfaces; and USB2 built in Ethernet with 1GB transmission. Software for Power PMAC has been researched thoroughly and carefully written so that the development environment integrates with MS Visual Studio.