“REM switch technology is an Ethernet switch,” explained Tom Weingartner, Innovasic’s vice president of marketing. “It is used in the industrial market space to provide a level of determinism that TSN is trying to achieve now with standards and can be tailored to the performance of protocols such as PROFINET, EtherCAT and Ethernet/IP.”
“The kit provides a path to full TSN Ethernet that developers can now access,” continued Volker Goller, European manager for real-time Ethernet. “The updates to our kit allow users to continuously evaluate TSN and determine how best to add value to their future products and system architectures.”
The kit contains everything needed to evaluate the features of the emerging IEEE 802.1 TSN standards. The kit is pre-installed with TSN features, including 802.1AS and 802.1Qbv.
Commenting, Weingartner said: “The most important standard within TSN is 802.1AS. This is the standard for incorporating time into the networks. The next one we support is called 802.1Qbv. This allows users to schedule messages on the network. The reason you want to do that is – if you think about robotic systems or motion control systems – they need precise periodic information updates. By being able to schedule information to show up certain times, it provides for a robust and reliable delivery of that information.”
The kit also offers stream translation.
“It is something that allows users to schedule a standard Ethernet message so that you can turn it into a stream that can be used on a TSN network,” said Weingartner.
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.
As TSN standards evolve, new features will be made available as free downloads through Innovasic’s Developer Portal.