Date: 19/08/2011

IP and a reference design for IEEE 1588 PTP on Microsemi's cSoC

Microsemi Corporation has made available of IP and a reference design for IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) on its SmartFusion customizable system-on-chip (cSoC) devices and its new Core1588, part of Microsemi's DirectCore IP and Libero IDE software tools, offered through Microsemi's SmartDesign IP catalog.

According to Gartner, Inc., the worldwide spending on programmable devices such as SmartFusion cSoCs within the industrial market is expected to increase by more than 50 percent from 2011 to 2015.

"Our Core1588 allows us to cater to the needs of our customer base and support the growing adoption of SoCs in industrial applications," said Rich Kapusta, vice president terrestrial products, SoC Products Group at Microsemi. "The evolving needs of designers in this space will continue to be an important focal point for Microsemi as we expand IP ecosystems for our award-winning SmartFusion cSoCs."

Microsemi explains Core1588 provides hardware support for the implementation of IEEE 1588 PTP capable systems, and interacts with firmware provided in the reference design, allows synchronization of devices connected to an Ethernet network with a high level of accuracy. One of the devices on the network serves as the master clock, while the other devices behave as slave clocks synchronizing to the master clock's value. The master clock is dynamically selected among the PTP capable devices on the network. The IEEE 1588 best master clock (BMC) algorithm is used to determine which device should be used as the master clock device.

SmartFusion cSoCs are the only devices that integrate an FPGA; a complete microcontroller built around a hard ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable analog, enabling full customization, IP protection and ease-of-use, says Microsemi. Based on Microsemi's proprietary flash process, SmartFusion devices are suitable for hardware and embedded designers who need a highly integrated SoC that provides more flexibility than traditional fixed-function microcontrollers, and significantly reduces the cost of soft processor cores on traditional FPGAs.

For more information, visit www.microsemi.com