From April 25-27 attended the 5th LXI Plugfest in Munich, Germany.

Two brand new PTP/IEEE1588 compliant products have been successfully tested for interoperability.

Besides the very first appearance of a LANTIME M600, acting as a PTP Grandmaster Clock, a prototype of the new IEEE1588 Slave Clock attracted the attendant IEEE1588 community members.

The relatively new LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation) standard is an initiative of – per today – 40 companies from the test & measurement sector.

LXI is an approach to succeed the GBIP cables, used for more than 35 years, and use standard Ethernet cabling and infrastructure components instead.

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.

Precision Time Protocol

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.

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 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 IEEE1588 slave clock prototype attracted attention and was the subject of a careful examination by many attendants of the PlugFest.

The new product is an 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 an IEEE1588-aware industrial switch acting as a PTP Boundary Clock).