The use of Ethernet in industrial control applications is growing at an estimated 50% compound annual growth rate. Leading companies such as Cisco, Rockwell Automation, and Schneider Electric are promoting the use of standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet as the basis for industrial Ethernet. As a result, the non-deterministic aspect of Ethernet must be addressed in time-critical control systems. Standard IEEE-1588 time synchronization can compensate for some of the non-deterministic behavior, but this approach has its limits.
End devices on the network are usually designed with inherent single-path processing of packet streams controlled via a real-time operating system (RTOS), limiting the end device’s ability to respond to high-priority packets and making them vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. A silicon alternative to a conventional software-implemented RTOS kernel, an “RTOS kernel in a chip,” could provide the answer.
In real-time control loops, data packet timing jitter causes problems. Non-critical packets such as http and ftp can delay critical messages, preventing control loops from operating correctly. Quality-of-service (QoS) tags can be used to prioritize the handling of packets at the network switches, but end devices are still vulnerable to packet delays. In the worst case, an overload of low-priority packets can create a denial-of-service situation and prevent the processing of time-critical messages.
THE FRAGMENTED ETHERNET APPROACH To address the QoS service problem, some companies are proposing modifications to Ethernet. They want to create time slots that allow motion control and other time-critical traffic to come through at predetermined times and shut down the network for other traffic during those critical periods.However, major players such as Cisco, Rockwell Automation, and Schneider Electric have banded together with the Open DeviceNet Vendors Association (ODVA) to avoid fragmenting into standard and non-standard Ethernet. With Ethernet, the TCP/IP stack tends to be a bottleneck for end devices in the network. The combination of the operating system (OS) and the stack can get bogged down handling the incoming traffic in the buffer.
AN ALTERNATIVE—AN EMBEDDED RTOS KERNEL Creating two paths through the end device, one for highpriority messages and one for low-priority messages, with the ability to interrupt and instantly switch between them can improve the QoS. For example, Innovasic’s 32-bit, 66-MHz fido (flexible input, deterministic output) microcontroller implements this embedded hardware approach.In fido, this is done using an on-chip programmable I/O engine that performs the media access control (MAC) function and examines each packet to determine its QoS priority. At this point, the traffic is separated on the chip, and the “silicon RTOS kernel” takes control. High-priority packets are buffered and processed using one of fido’s “hardware contexts,” while low-priority packets are buffered separately and processed using another lower-priority hardware context.
Each hardware context is the silicon equivalent of an RTOS thread, but with priority and context switching all handled in silicon. This approach is extremely deterministic and maintains a physically separate path all the way from the physical layer (PHY) to the application.
In a conventional software RTOS, context switching times are non-deterministic and impacted by many factors beyond the control of the embedded system designer. In particular, a conventional RTOS cannot normally interrupt TCP/IP stack processing. So if the stack has just begun processing a low-priority packet, a high-priority packet arriving at the chip must wait.
The silicon RTOS kernel overcomes this inherent limitation of software-based RTOS control by giving high-priority traffic instantaneous access to the CPU at all times. Not only does this allow for real-time processing of high-priority packets, it also provides protection from denial-of-service attacks at the end device.
Using an industrial Modbus/TCP application, Schneider Electric evaluated fido with its embedded RTOS kernel against a popular 133-MHz 32-bit RISC processor with a softwareimplemented RTOS kernel. The fido’s programmable I/O engines provided a custom Ethernet MAC with two separate data paths on the silicon based on the QoS tags. This custom MAC was 100% compliant with standard 802.3 Ethernet.
The on-chip RTOS kernel provided a partitioned execution environment, with separate contexts to handle the low-priority and high-priority TCP/IP stacks and traffic flow. With the embedded kernel and custom MAC, the fido MCU achieved a worst-case latency of 1.1 ms and worst-case jitter of 130 µs.
In contrast, the processor with the software RTOS kernel achieved worst-case 1.8-ms latency and worst-case jitter of 760 µs. In time-critical applications such as motion control, a 39% reduction in latency and almost six-times reduction in jitter QoS improvement demonstrates a technique that is an alternative to a fragmented Ethernet approach.