TTP Controller Targets VPNs

April 28, 2003

A time triggered protocol (TTP) bus is the architecture of choice for safety-critical environments such as automotive steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire systems. NEC's TINA bus controller chip is compatible with TTTech's TTP-IP C2S protocol. The chip incorporates a two-channel 5-Mbit/s TTP bus controller. The link operates at 40 MHz with an interframe gap under 5 ms. On-chip memory includes 4 kbytes of RAM for the Communication Network Interface (CNI) and 8 kbytes for the Message Descriptor List (MEDL) used for scheduling information.

Sample quantities of the TINA chip are available now for $25. Volume production of automotive-grade products is expected in 2005. It runs on 3.3 V and operates from −40°C to 85°C. A free reference design is available with an NEC V850 microcontroller.

NEC Electronics
www.nec.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.