Line redundancy in MVB-TCN devices: a control unit design

TCN (Train Communication Network) standard was approved in 1999 by the IEC (IEC 61375-1) and IEEE (IEEE 1473-T) organizations to warrant a reliable train and equipment interoperability. TCN defines two serial buses: WTB (wire train bus) and MVB (multifunction vehicle bus), permitting double line attachments in both of them. Each attached device must take one of the lines as its trusted line and commute to the other, its observed line, if necessary. Its line redundancy control unit is responsible for these tasks. The MVB line redundancy control unit design here presented is, to our knowledge, the first one to be published. It is but one bit of the top-down full compliant MVB device design (class 1 to class 5) being developed by the authors to get a true reconfigurable system on chip. Our proposal, based on concurrent and parametrical techniques, owns both a high speed performance and an easy reconfigurability. Moreover, the performance of our design is only limited by the standard constraints themselves, being not restricted by our design criteria or our proposed implementation