Bus Cycle Measuring

For measuring the time, a frame is \on the wire", two timestamps must be taken:
1. The time, the Ethernet hardware begins with physically sending the frame.
2. The time, the frame is completely received by the Ethernet hardware.
Both times are dicult to determine. The rst reason is, that the interrupts are
disabled and the master is not noti ed, when a frame is sent or received (polling
would distort the results). The second reason is, that even with interrupts enabled,
the time from the event to the noti cation is unknown. Therefore the only way to
con dently determine the bus cycle time is an electrical measuring.
Anyway, the bus cycle time is an important factor when designing realtime code,
because it limits the maximum frequency for the cyclic task of the application. In
practice, these timing parameters are highly dependent on the hardware and often a
trial and error method must be used to determine the limits of the system.
The central question is: What happens, if the cycle frequency is too high? The answer
is, that the EtherCAT frames that have been sent at the end of the cycle are not yet
received, when the next cycle starts. First this is noticed by ecrt domain process(),
because the working counter of the process data datagrams were not increased. The
function will notify the user via Syslog1. In this case, the process data keeps being the

same as in the last cycle, because it is not erased by the domain. When the domain
datagrams are queued again, the master notices, that they are already queued (and
marked as sent). The master will mark them as unsent again and output a warning,
that datagrams were \skipped".
On the mentioned 2:0 GHz system, the possible cycle frequency can be up to 25 kHz
without skipped frames. This value can surely be increased by choosing faster hard-
ware. Especially the RealTek network hardware could be replaced by a faster one.
Besides, implementing a dedicated ISR for EtherCAT devices would also contribute
to increasing the latency. These are two points on the author's to-do list.