What the NX701-Z600 is and what scale it serves
The NX701-Z600 is a high-axis-count motion controller from OMRON's NX7 platform, rated to manage up to 128 synchronous axes or 128 axes including virtual axes on the NX I/O Bus. It ships as a standalone motion brain — AI control, motion control, and sequence control combined in one unit — and talks EtherCAT Master, EtherNet/IP and Ethernet TCP/IP on the same copper. At 3 kg shipping weight it is a mid-weight DIN or panel-mount unit; the 80 MB program memory and 260 MB variables memory tell the integrator the application code and tag pool will not be constrained on a cell-level or multi-axis coordinated motion project. The 0.125 ms primary task cycle time is the scan budget the motion planner works within — fast enough for coordinated cam and gearing profiles on 128 axes, which is the spec that separates this from lower-axis-count NX5 or NX6 variants.
What the communications stack means for panel integration
EtherCAT Master on the NX701-Z600 makes it a scan-master for distributed EtherCAT slaves — the I/O map is built in the same Sysmac Studio environment as the sequence and motion code, so one project file covers the controller and its field devices. EtherNet/IP and TCP/IP coexist on the same port, so a SCADA or MES host can pull data over EtherNet/IP while a legacy PLC talks TCP/IP on the same physical link without a separate module. The NX I/O Bus is the backplane bus for local NX-series I/O and safety modules co-located in the same control cabinet — it is not a fieldbus that routes out to remote I/O, so panel designers should plan NX series I/O modules in the same enclosure row rather than expecting the NX I/O Bus to substitute for a distributed EtherCAT or PROFINET drop.