Design and Evaluation of a Low-Latency AVB Ethernet Endpoint Based on ARM SoC
Christian Herber, Ammar Saeed, Andreas Herkersdorf · 2015
Communication requirements in automotive electronics are steadily increasing. To satisfy this demand and enable future automotive embedded architectures, new interconnect technologies are needed. Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Ethernet is a promising candidate to accomplish this as it features timesensitive and synchronous communication in combination with high bit rates. However, there is a lack of commercial products as well as research regarding AVB-capable system-on-chips (SoCs). In this paper, we investigate how and at what cost a legacy Ethernet MAC can be enhanced into an AVB Ethernet controller. Using FPGA prototyping and a real system based on an ARM Cortex-A9 SoC running Linux, we conducted a series of experiments to evaluate important performance metrics and to validate our design decisions. We achieved frame release latencies of less than 6 μs and time-synchronization with an endpoint-induced inaccuracy of up to 8 μs.