TSN Ethernet evaluation kit for industrial and automotive applications
Innovasic has supplied ICs supporting all flavours of industrial Ethernet for over a decade; and has been active, and has carefully tracked, the emerging IEEE effort on 802.1 (TSN) standards. This, the company notes, emerged from the increasing use of Ethernet for audio and video content, and is evolving into a broadly-based “menu” of sub-standards to address all aspects of deterministic networking. Innovasic anticipates the standards, or at least the current round, to be complete in 12 – 18 months; meanwhile, it aims to make its evaluation kit a constantly-updated resource that will allow users to access each element of TSN as it firms up.
The kit contains everything needed to evaluate the features of the emerging IEEE TSN standard and is pre-installed with the most mature TSN features starting with 802.1AS and 802.1Qbv. As TSN standards evolve, new features will be made available as free downloads through Innovasic’s Developer Portal.
The TSN standards that will be supported by future updates to the kit are:
802.1AS, AS-REV – Time Synchronization
802.1Qbv – Scheduled Traffic (updates)
802.1Qci – Ingress Policing
802.1CB – Seamless Redundancy
802.1Qcc – Stream Reservation Protocol
802.1Qbu / 802.3br – Preemption
The overall structure of the TSN effort is to produce a fully-determinstic networking capability, while retaining full backward compatibility with ‘standard’ Ethernet. The kit is aimed at the industrial and automotive sectors, but also at other areas such as professional audio.
Evaluation of TSN is simplified by using the kit as a TSN gateway. Ethernet enabled devices can be plugged into the kit’s standard Ethernet port and the other two ports are plugged into a TSN network. The TSN gateway is then configured to send and receive TSN streams over the TSN network based messages to and from the standard Ethernet device. In this way, a standard Ethernet device can talk to any other TSN-enabled device on a TSN network; standard Ethernet messages are tagged to be handled in the TST ‘cloud’.
In the box; the kit contains a baseboard and two further cards to make standard Ethernet connections: networking options that can be explored include all common variants such as star, ring ad mesh connections. The kit will be used to demonstrate the capabilities of TSN at the 2016 IEEE Standards Association Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day in Paris, France September 20th and 21st; and at the 2016 Congress Industrial Ethernet TSN in Stuttgart, Germany, on September 27th. The kit can be ordered directly from www.deterministicethernet.com for an introductory price of $495.
Innovasic, Inc; www.innovasic.com
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
