Design and Evaluation of a Low-Latency AVB Ethernet Endpoint Based on ARM SoC

Communication requirements in automotive electronics are steadily increasing. To satisfy this demand and enable future automotive embedded architectures, new interconnect technologies are needed. Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Ethernet is a promising candidate to accomplish this as it features time-sensitive and synchronous communication in combination with high bit rates. However, there is a lack of commercial products as well as research regarding AVB-capable system-on-chips (SoCs). In this paper, we investigate how and at what cost a legacy Ethernet MAC can be enhanced into an AVB Ethernet controller. Using FPGA prototyping and a real system based on an ARM Cortex-A9 SoC running Linux, we conducted a series of experiments to evaluate important performance metrics and to validate our design decisions. We achieved frame release latencies of less than 6 μs and time-synchronization with an endpoint-induced inaccuracy of up to 8 μs.