Microchip adds EtherCAT and TSN IP to its PolarFire FPGA and SoC platform

Microchip announced on 29 October 2026 that its industrial edge networking stack for PolarFire devices now includes EtherCAT and Time-Sensitive Networking. The EtherCAT IP comes from Beckhoff Automation, the company behind the protocol, and runs on both PolarFire FPGAs and PolarFire SoC devices at 10, 100 or 1000 Mbps. The TSN IP is Microchip’s own and targets PolarFire SoC parts, providing deterministic 1 Gbps Ethernet built on the IEEE 802.1 TSN standards. The press release does not say which 802.1 sub-standards (such as time-aware shaping or clock synchronisation) are implemented, so check the IP documentation before committing to a design.

Microchip positions the combination for motion control, robotics, embedded vision and autonomous mobile robots, where one FPGA can handle the fieldbus, the real-time control loop and the sensor interfaces. The company stresses PolarFire’s non-volatile configuration, which gives instant-on behaviour, and its secure boot and anti-tamper features. Design support comes through Libero SoC, the IP cores and reference designs. For prototyping, Microchip points to the ETH-DC-DUALGBE dual-port gigabit Ethernet FMC card and the MPFS250-VIDEO-KIT. The release gives no pricing, no availability date for the IP and no Libero version number. Shakeel Peera, who runs Microchip’s FPGA business unit, framed the announcement around AI moving closer to the factory floor.

Why it matters

EtherCAT on an FPGA is not new, but a vendor-supported Beckhoff core on a low-power flash-based family with a hard RISC-V subsystem is a convenient package for industrial designers who want one chip for the fieldbus and the control loop. The practical questions are licensing (Beckhoff IP normally needs its own agreement and a conformance test) and how much of the TSN feature set is hard-timed in logic rather than handled by Linux on the SoC cores. Ask for the IP user guide before planning around it.