Product Announcement: New IEEE 1588 / PTP Slot Card for PCI Express

Meinberg Radio Clocks today announced the immediate availability of their new PTP270PEX slot card. The newest member of the Meinberg PCI Express product family will synchronize servers and/or workstations with an IEEE 1588-2008 (PTPv2) grandmaster clock over a standard Ethernet network connection.

The new card can be installed in any standard single lane (1x) PCIe slot and facilitates completely new synchronization concepts for networked computer systems. The sub-microsecond synchronization performance to the Grandmaster is comparable to a Meinberg GPS slot card like the GPS170PEX and offers microsecond accuracy when accessing the card from within your own applications. As a result, highly accurate time stamps in data aquisition and measurement applications are now possible without a dedicated sync cable infrastructure or a GPS antenna installation.

Utilizing standard Ethernet cable infrastructure for the communication of a PTP270PEX and a PTPv2 Grandmaster (like the LANTIME M600/GPS/PTPv2) dramatically reduces the effort required to interconnect computer systems that need to run on synchronized time. Instead of having to design and install a dedicated cable infrastructure for distributing IRIG time codes or GPS antenna signals to a group of computer systems, the already existing Cat5 (or better) Ethernet infrastructure can be used.

The Meinberg IEEE 1588 slot card only requires to install the regular Meinberg driver that is also used for GPS, IRIG and DCF77 slot cards as well as Meinberg's USB devices. Installing and maintaining a complete PTP protocol stack is not required, the PTP270PEX leverages its own integrated high-performance microprocessor.

Additionally the PTP270PEX card provides legacy timing signal outputs like IRIG DCLS, Pulse per second or 10MHz which can be used to synchronize devices installed next to the PTP270PEX host computer. Some outputs like the pulse-per-second connector deliver the full internal accuracy of the card which can be as good as +/- 20ns to its grandmaster clock. This accuracy is also supported with the two trigger event inputs that can be used to hardware time stamp external events. The Meinberg Single Driver concept enables the user to simply replace any other Meinberg slot card or USB device with the PTP270PEX if required, as long as the installed driver supports both the old and the new card, no software change is required.

The free SDK is fully compatible with all Meinberg slot cards and USB devices, so that existing third party applications (previously accessing a Meinberg GPS or IRIG slot card) can be used with the new PTP270PEX card - without the need for source code changes or recompiling.