Avnu Alliance, the industry consortium driving open, standards-based deterministic networking, announces a new initiative to drive alignment on TSN interoperability in the network ecosystem.
In the Silicon Validation Task Group, silicon and IP companies including Analog Devices, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Microchip, NXP Semiconductors, Texas Instruments, and TTTech will work together to ensure that the TSN features of various profiles interoperate.
“As an active developer of TSN technology innovation at the silicon and system level for many years, NXP is pleased to work with our counterparts in the Silicon Validation Task Group to help craft a common set of standards for TSN,” says Jeff Steinheider, senior director and general manager, industrial edge, at NXP.
“This collaboration and the associated standards will help developers take advantage of TSN’s full potential across the spectrum of related applications.”
Avnu has a history of providing a successful framework for industry stakeholders to collaborate to advance TSN. This task group will allow competitors to work together to develop a testing ecosystem for silicon and IP products’ TSN capabilities at the component (and supporting software) level. Group members will collaborate on activities such as developing test plans, creating validation tools, and hosting plugfests.
The members of the Silicon Validation Task Group have come together in recognition of the fact that interoperability is required at the silicon level to enable specialization further up the stack. TSN applications span markets, including ProAV, automotive, industrial manufacturing, and aerospace. Base interoperability at the component level facilitates device interoperability across various applications and profiles, including IEEE/IEC 60802 for industrial and IEEE 802.1BA for ProAV as well as future profiles that are in development.
“We consider an open, cross-industry standard like TSN as an essential basis for successful industrial automation projects. Interoperability at the silicon level ensures that customers have more choice and flexibility when digitalizing their production. As more companies and industries start using TSN, the huge benefits of interoperability increase – we can already see that in the plastics industry where the EUROMAP 79 standard specifies using TSN as the networking technology for injection molding machines,” notes Thomas Berndorfer, member of the executive board, TTTech Industrial.
The Silicon Validation Task Group’s efforts will allow silicon vendors to achieve better economies of scale for TSN products. By providing a roadmap to verify base TSN capabilities in a common way independently from profile or application, the Silicon Validation Task Group will enable silicon providers to develop products for a broad customer base.
