IEEE Standard 1451 and a proposed time synchronization approach

This paper proposes enhancements for the IEEE 1451 set of standards for smart transducers. The implementation in a distributed network of the IEEE 1588 protocol to synchronize the real-time clocks included in the IEEE 1451 devices (TIMs and NCAP) that constitute the network is described in this paper, and the results obtained are presented. The measuring system uses the USB ports of the PC, which emulate the NCAP, to connect two TIMs, and the implementation in the distributed system of the IEEE 1588 protocol to synchronize the real-time clocks present in the TIMs allows trigger synchronization accuracies of several hundreds of nanoseconds.