The Four EtherNet/IP Mistakes


You Need To Know!

Many users fail to make the proper distinction between CIP, DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP and ControlNet leading to misunderstandings of the capabilities of devices which support these technologies.

In a nutshell, CIP or Control and Information Protocol is the protocol for accessing a CIP device (EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, ControlNet) as a set of objects. The entire object structure, object classes, instances, attributes and protocol to read/write those attributes, is CIP. CIP is completely hardware independent. CIP objects can be accessed using any transport or physical layer including Ethernet (EtherNet/IP), CAN (Device) or even RS485 if you want.

EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet and ControlNet are protocols that consist of CIP and a specific transport and physical communications layer. EtherNet/IP is CIP over Ethernet while DeviceNet is CIP over CAN. Of course, the object model (CIP data model) changes slightly for each transport layer. CAN has a DeviceNet object while Ethernet has a TCP/IP object.