Industrial network, often referred to as fieldbus, becomes an indispensable component for intelligent manufacturing systems. Thus, in order to satisfy the real-time requirements of field devices such as sensors, actuators, and controllers, numerous fieldbus protocols have been developed. But, the application of fieldbus has been limited due to the high cost of hardware and the difficulty in interfacing with multi-vendor products. As an alternative to fieldbus, the Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) technology is being adapted to the industrial environment. However, the crucial technical obstacle of Ethernet is its non-deterministic behavior that cannot satisfy the real-time requirements. Recently, the EtherCAT protocol becomes a very promising alternative for real-time industrial application due to the elimination of uncertainties in Ethernet. This paper focuses on the implementation of the IEC 61800 based real-time EtherCAT network for multi-axis smart driver. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implemented EtherCAT slave module, its synchronization performance is evaluated on the experimental EtherCAT testbed with a single axis smart driver.