EtherCAT almost at 60 million nodes and exponential growth

The EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) has recently published node figures for the first time since EtherCAT was introduced 20 years ago. Excluding modular I/O devices, ETG now counts 59.1 million nodes, with recent growth being particularly high. Since 2014 growth has been exponential, with 18.4 million nodes added in 2022 alone.

These figures include EtherCAT chips sold in a respective year, though this does not include the chips for Bus Terminals. Thus, a modular I/O station counts as a single node, even if it consists of many more EtherCAT Bus Terminals.

“The chip numbers are accurate figures, but there is a certain time lag: not every chip becomes an installed EtherCAT device in the same calendar year,” said Martin Rostan, Executive Director of the EtherCAT Technology Group.

Rostan is also in charge of all EtherCAT licensing on behalf of Beckhoff Automation. EtherCAT, similar to CAN, requires only the chip manufacturer to license their hardware, the cost of which is included in the purchase of the EtherCAT chips. Beckhoff Automation finances the EtherCAT Technology Group with the chip licence income, and membership in the fieldbus association is free of charge.

“Because we don’t know the exact unit numbers of FPGA IP core-based implementations, we have held back on publishing node numbers so far,” Rostan said. “But the reported unit numbers of the current 12 EtherCAT chip vendors are now so large that any possible fuzziness in estimating FPGA numbers is no longer a factor: they enter the totals at less than 10%.

“We have also included multiprotocol chips in proportion to the market share of the protocols. Thus, on the one hand, the figures are based on very reliable sources, and on the other hand, they are determined very conservatively: there are probably significantly more EtherCAT devices.”

In 2022, 18.4 million EtherCAT chips were sold. This brings the total number of EtherCAT nodes to 59.1 million.

Except for 2019, where EtherCAT unit numbers were also unable to escape the sideways trend of the automation market, growth has been exponential for several years.

“Three years ago, we still believed in an upward outlier, but now the trend has solidified: the exponential growth continues,” Rostan said. “The Asian market is developing the fastest, especially China. But EtherCAT is also making better and better progress in North America. And in Europe, where EtherCAT has its origins, EtherCAT has been going strong for quite some time.”