Despite Headwinds, EtherCAT Sees Robust Growth with 88 Million Nodes
The EtherCAT success story continues: The EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) now reports around 88 million EtherCAT nodes in the field worldwide. And even if the pace of growth in recent years could not be maintained due to the current global economic climate and the after-effects of chip overstocking, the result is impressive: another 11 million their nodes were added in 2024–an outstanding result in a challenging business environment.
These node figures are very reliable as they are based on actual chip sales, which are reported by the chip manufacturers to Beckhoff Automation, the inventor of EtherCAT technology. “And they have no interest in exaggerating these figures, as this would entail additional costs for them,” explained Martin Rostan, executive director of the EtherCAT Technology Group. With EtherCAT, the technology license is included directly in the chip, so there are no additional license fees for device manufacturers and users. Beckhoff uses the license revenue to finance the activities of the EtherCAT Technology Group and thus the ecosystem surrounding the technology.
The number of FPGA-based EtherCAT devices, which can only be estimated, remains an uncertain factor when calculating the number of nodes. “We assume that these implementations make up around 10% of the total number. The figure is probably even higher, but we are being deliberately conservative in our estimate,” continued Rostan. Multi-protocol chips are also taken into account, but only proportionally in relation to the market share of EtherCAT at the respective manufacturers.
Despite continued global economic challenges, they remains on course for robust growth and reasserts its leading position in industrial communication with the publication of these latest node figures.
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