Hi everybody,
We are watching the development of the RT1180 with interest because we are i.MXRT users and PTP users, and a "Gb Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Switch to enable real-time rich networking for both TSN-based and industrial real-time communications" certainly seems like it must have hardware timestamping working underneath.
We are mainly interested in having an industrial switch chipset capable of implementing PTP transparent clock (perhaps running the FW to implement it directly on the M7), but another possibility might be to use DSA to emulate three or four independent interfaces, each with hardware timestamping, and synchronize clocks on our nodes that way.
The 1180 is starting to show up in the latest versions of the Real-time Edge Software User Guide
https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/REALTIMEEDGEUG.pdf
with this intriguing introduction:
"Heterogeneous Multi-SoC Framework enables the usage of a combination of MPU and i.MX RT1180 as an Industrial Switch. This extends the MPU hardware capability with the i.MX RT1180 hardware capability, thereby providing switch functionality, TSN functionality, and the capability of supporting different Industrial Protocols. The i.MX RT1180 can be used to run real-time tasks such as industrial protocols in the real-time domain, whereas the MPU can process compute-heavy tasks, in the non-real-time domain."
but so far just mentioning DSA and discussing how the i.MX8 and i.MXRT1180 eval boards can be connected, how to compile the demo software, and NOT describing any real-time applications.
So perhaps it is a bit early, but I have some questions:
*Are there plans to expose and explicitly support 802.1AS/PTP on the RT1180?
*Are there plans (by NXP or a third party) to develop FW for PTP transparent clock on the RT1180?
* Is the DSA setup illustrated in Figure 45 of the Real-time Edge Software User Guide intended to provide PTP hardware timestamping in such a way that the virtualized ports are compatible with linuxptp?
Thanks for your attention,
-Kevin
