Avnu Alliance, the industry consortium driving open, standards-based deterministic networking, announced a new initiative to drive alignment on TSN (time sensitive networking) interoperability in the network ecosystem.In the Silicon Validation Task Group, silicon and IP companies including Analog Devices, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Microchip Technology, NXP Semiconductors, Texas Instruments and TTTech will work together to ensure that the TSN features of various profiles interoperate.
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 specialisation 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.
“Software, applications and profiles can all be tailored to specific use cases, but they need a stable network foundation to build on top of,” said Greg Schlechter, president of the Avnu Alliance. “The Silicon Validation Task Group includes key market players who can identify what TSN interoperability means for basic network components and how we can get interoperable products to market.”
The new 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, it will enable silicon providers to develop products for a broad customer base.“Ethernet’s universal success is centred around standards-based, interoperable silicon,” stated Tom Weingartner, product marketing director for the industrial Ethernet technology group at Analog Devices. “As silicon providers, we are coming together to ensure this next generation of Ethernet with TSN is equally successful across the spectrum of silicon solutions.”
Interoperability at the silicon level gives TSN the flexibility for technological advancements from one market to cross-pollinate to others. TSN capabilities developed for industrial applications could eventually be adopted by ProAV, for example, or real-time media distribution methods created for ProAV could benefit Industry 4.0. This cycle of innovation has been key to Ethernet’s expansion beyond its original applications. As TSN becomes simply another capability of the standard network ecosystem, silicon components should support capabilities coming online across industries.
The Silicon Validation Task Group is open to all Avnu members. Companies interested in joining this collaborative effort can visit www.avnu.org to learn more and get involved.
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