ODVA CIP Motion

CIP Motion is a motion-control profile for EtherNet/IP that defines drive-control extensions for servo and variable-speed drives. It supports torque, velocity, and position control, drive configuration, status, and diagnostics, and unicast or multicast communication. It uses synchronized end-device clocks and time-stamped messages so cyclic motion data can tolerate jitter on standard Ethernet.

Source checked3/3 values · 2026-10-25

Specification

1 source

Transports	tcp, ethernet l2
Architecture	producer consumer
Encoding	binary
Standard body	ODVA
Standard ref	IEEE 802.3

Study notes

CIP Motion is an application profile under EtherNet/IP; it defines drive-control extensions rather than a separate physical network.
Profile functions include torque, velocity, or position control of servo and variable-speed drives, plus drive configuration, status, and diagnostics.
Communications include unicast control-to-drive and multicast peer-to-peer messages; multicast supports position and velocity synchronization across drives controlled by multiple distributed controllers.
Centralized and distributed motion control are both supported, with a common application interface for general-purpose and motion drives.
CIP Sync is ODVA's IEEE-1588-compliant precision clock synchronization and is mapped into the CIP object model.
The document cites less than 1 µs jitter for cyclic data as necessary for precise speed or position control and states clock synchronization better than 200 ns can be achieved.
Time-stamped messages and synchronized end-device clocks reduce the effect of jitter in message receipt time.
CIP Motion runs on standard unmodified Ethernet and is compatible with star and linear topologies.
The network does not need scheduling; packet size and content can change dynamically, including status or command data and drive operating mode changes.
Performance upgrades to 1 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s are described as easy for users and device suppliers.