News from 2006-05-03
Meinbergs PTP/IEEE1588 Products at the LXI Plugfest in Munich
Due to the broad range of recommendations, rules and best practices the LXI standard provides, building multi-vendor test and measurement systems will be a lot easier in the future.
PTP (Precision Time Protocol), also known as IEEE1588, is a main part of the LXI standard and every LXI Class A or B compliant product has to be IEEE1588 compliant. Because of this a number of IEEE1588 tests are performed on every LXI PlugFest within the general LXI Class A and Class B certification process.
At this 4th PlugFest, which was hosted by Rohde & Schwarz in Munich, Germany, two new IEEE1588 compliant products have been presented and successfully tested by Meinberg.
The new LANTIME M600 acted as a Grandmaster Clock (i.e. high accuracy source of time). It combines a single board computer with a special PTP/IEEE1588 network port and a Meinberg GPS time receiver with a high accuracy oscillator (OCXO-HQ) and comes in a brand new housing with a new display and front panel (more details on the LANTIME M600/GPS/PTP product page)
The small and compact Meinberg IEEE1588 slave clock prototype attracted attention and was the subject of a careful examination by many attendants of the PlugFest. The new product is a IEEE1588 synchronized generator for PPS and 10Mhz signals. Although it is still a prototype and only integrates a cost-effective oscillator (OCXO-LQ), the PPS offset from the PTP Grandmaster clock was within the range of +/- 50 nanoseconds under all tested circumstances (e.g. connecting it to a standard ethernet hub or a IEEE1588-aware industrial switch acting as a PTP Boundary Clock).
Both products did not show any problems during the time synchronization tests with IEEE1588 equipment from other vendors (like Agilent Technologies).