The following is part of  A Comprehensible Guide to Industrial Ethernet by Wilfried Voss.

While distributed control delivers a significant number of advantages, the most prominent being the vastly reduced amount of wiring, it still has to deal with the restrictions of traditional serial communication technologies, specifically their bandwidth limitations. 

The result is that traditional technologies, especially when it comes to real-time control requirements, heavily depend on high-performance nodes, a circumstance that, with few exceptions, does not apply to Industrial Ethernet. Industrial Ethernet changes several views in the theory of Fieldbus systems.

For more details, see the following chapters addressing the dependence on intelligent nodes in a network and real-time control considerations.

netSHIELD"NSHIELD 52-RE" - Industrial Ethernet Development Platform

netSHIELD is an evaluation expansion board with Arduino compatible connectors for development purposes.

It enables the user to connect a Microcontroller based application to all market relevant Real-Time-Ethernet industrial networks with best-in-class real-time capabilities, like PROFINET, Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT, and others.

The extension board features a netX 52 system-on-chip. The netX SoC architecture is designed from the ground up for the highest demands on flexibility, determinism, and performance in terms of multi-protocol capability and low latency for short cycle times. The heterogeneous multi-core architecture features an ARM processor core, coupled with a flexible communication subsystem (xC) for varieties of industrial applications support.

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