Co-developed with Xilinx and Texas Instruments with supporting technology from Austria's B&R Automation, the Spartan-6 FPGA-based kit delivers a complete implementation of the POWERLINK protocol (Controlled Node), development tools and other design resources to help developers of industrial networking applications build their systems quickly at the lowest cost.

Ethernet POWERLINK is an industrial networking protocol standard that was first developed in 2001 by B&R Automation, an Austrian company. Today, the standard has been open-sourced and is managed by the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group (EPSG), an independent association.

At the end of 2011, POWERLINK was approved as a Chinese nationally recommended standard, GB/T 27960-2011. [/sws_toggle1]