EtherCAT is proprietary. If this sits on top of Ethernet, and you can get the software to do so, then yes. If EtherCAT is to behave directly as a hardware driver in place of an Ethernet driver, then it would depend on being able to get access to that driver (which I expect would be proprietary and expensive); even then, it would have to likely be in source form because as a kernel module it would have to load into the existing kernel, and such loads imply the module needs to be compiled against that configuration. If you were to do this on an Ubuntu desktop PC, what would the instructions be regarding drivers and software install?
User space software is probably not an issue on the Jetson, it really is a very tiny powerful PC using an arm64 architecture. Kernel space is where it differs in talking to the hardware. Often details such as jitter can be circumvented with dedicated hardware which controls the signal; however, if the Jetson requires its own clock to feed that hardware, then I would expect issues with jitter (Jetsons are not hard realtime devices, and score slightly lower on the soft realtime behavior; devices running on this are independent of the Jetson’s jitter behavior).
So an example question for you to examine: On a desktop PC, what software would be needed for the cat 5? Is it just something talking over ordinary Ethernet hardware, or does it specialize in specific network device hardware? Often the more expensive proprietary standards might depend on a dongle for licensing reasons; if so, will the dongle itself function on Jetson’s arm64
architecture?
Incidentally, much of this would depend on the specific model of Jetson. Once looking at that model, then the carrier board would also matter. An example of this is that the AGX Orin (and I think AGX Xavier) supports a pair of internal Ethernet controllers (please verify that before you depend on it), but the carrier board of the dev kit only exposes one. A third party carrier board on an AGX Orin module could perhaps have two 10 Gb/s ports (most likely you’d want to just work with 1 Gb/s for a lot of reasons). The point is that if two ports are available, but the carrier board exposes only one, then switching to some third party carrier board might make two ports available. Just be certain to verify that the two ports are not just one controller with a switch and are two actual independent controllers. Someone else would need to answer those details, I’m just speculating.
There are in fact PCIe NICs which a Jetson can use if the carrier board supports it. That’s another option for a given Jetson model on different third party carrier boards (the AGX Orin and AGX Xavier do expose one PCIe socket, but you can’t see it without removing the cover for that part of the unit): PCIe add-ons. A single PCIe add-on that has multiple ports might be problematic if you want one of those ports to be Ethercat and the other ordinary Ethernet. However, answering that would be no different on the Jetson than it would be on a PC.
I will suggest you take a browse through the NVIDIA partners ecosystem URL:
https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/ecosystem
Incidentally, at least one company has some support for “better” realtime: Concurrent Real-Time. I have never used their software, and so I have no idea how well it works, nor do I know of the cost, but if timings are important, then you might at least browse what they have. The main problem there is that if you have proprietary EtherCAT software/hardware, then it might be more difficult to adapt to what they have (I’ve never seen what is in Concurrent’s software so I can’t be certain whether it would be of any use to you or not; certainly the realtime nature is limited by the Jetson hardware regardless of how well the software manages the hardware timing).