An IEEE 1588 Hardware Unit for Low Cost Embedded Systems

Network synchronization is becoming increasingly more common in high-speed wireless network that need to know the position of nodes. Time synchronization is needed to obtain precision positions. However, previous methods, such as Global Positioning Systems (GPSs) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), have some weakness. IEEE 1588 Time Synchronization Standard was introduced to compensate for this. There are two ways to implement IEEE 1588, via software or via hardware. Although easy to implement via software, significant delays and jitter occur at the application level when packets are received. Hardware implementation decreases delay and jitter than software implementation because time stamping point of the hardware is closer to the physical layer. A hardware-implemented IEEE 1588 module is part of network processors, such as Network on a Chip (NoC), the embedded network system (ENS), and network processor with a wireless sense network. Embedded systems in particular need a small area and low power, but high performance. Therefore, hardware FU resource sharing is a better approach than delay and offset calculation in the IEEE 1588 module. We propose a Functional Unit (FU) resource sharing model that supports the IEEE 1588 standard. The model we designed and the original model are simulated in a Bus Functional Model (BFM) using the high-level language, Python, and are implemented using the hardware description language, Verilog HDL. Based on the results of this study, area and dynamic power consumption are reduced by 23.3% and 85.5%, respectively, and there is an acceptable decrease in performance. Therefore, the proposed module is good to applied in embedded systems with low power and a small area.