First EtherCAT Temperature Control Device Passes Conformance Testing

Watlow®, an industry leader in the design and manufacture of complete thermal systems, recently announced that its EZ-ZONE® RM multi-loop temperature controller is the first EtherCAT® device to pass conformance testing in North America.
Watlow’s device passed conformance testing at the new North American EtherCAT® Test Center based in Savage, Minnesota. Stan Breitlow, Watlow’s principal engineer and semiconductor system designer, accepted the award from Florian Hafele, the onsite representative from the EtherCAT® Technology Group (ETG).
“We are extremely proud to receive this recognition from the ETG,” said Breitlow. “We have worked hard to integrate EtherCAT® into our EZ-ZONE RM and as a result we have an industry-leading solution for our customers. This success depended upon the superb collaborations that occurred with leading members of the community and we look forward to continuing these successful relationships.”
Watlow’s EZ-ZONE® RM is rapidly becoming an industry standard due to its extreme flexibility and scalability allowing unparalleled mixing of inputs and outputs to configure control loops, limit loops and monitoring points. Watlow is deeply committed to the semiconductor industry as exemplified by the early adoption of EtherCAT®. This major milestone in our control’s evolution now enables customers to integrate the latest generation of communications protocol to their tools.
Incorporating Watlow’s EZ-ZONE RM with EtherCAT® into semiconductor applications offers many benefits to tool manufacturers such as assured compatibility between devices and vendors, a single, unified Bus through the entire tool, seamless and rapid communications, predefined device parameter profiles, Bus redundancy and fault detection and standard Ethernet wiring.