Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) IIC(R) Plugfest Application core

The TSN Industrial Internet Consortium(R) (IIC) Plugfest Application is a companion core for the TSN IP cores from NetTimeLogic. The IIC(R) Plugfest Application implements an OPC/UA Talker, Listener, Analyzer and Publisher according to the interoperability application used at the IIC(R) TSN Testbed, as well as the IIC(R) LED Strip Application and a LED Pattern generator. It also offers an external application interface to connect a custom application to the Plugfest Application without the need to handle frame encoding/decoding in the application or a specific timing.

The Talker will send periodically, precisely timely aligned OPC/UA frames with hardware timestamps and data encapsulation.
The Listener will parse and extract the data and meta data from the OPC/UA frames and take hardware timestamps on reception which will be used by the Analyzer and Applications.
The Analyzer and Publisher calculates statistics over the received OPC/UA frames and publishes the statistics via frames for status supervision and analysis.

The LED Application is a PWM generator for the LED brightness based on the data from the Listener according to the LED Strip Application defined by the IIC(R). It also has a LED pattern generator which is connected to the Talker as the counterpart to the LED Appliction.

The Core connects to the TSN cores via AXI stream with two differnet streams: a high priority and a best effort stream and uses the status information from the TSN core as input for the OPC/UA frames.

The core gives a fast and easy solutionto take part in the IIC(R) Testbed/Plugfests.

All tables, protocols and algorithms are implemented completely in HW in the core, no CPU is required, except for configuration. This allows running OPC/UA stream handling in hardware without an OPC/UA software stack.