A New Instrum ent for Real-Tim e Ethernet Perform ance M easurem ent

In the last few years Ethernet has become the standard de facto for local area network. Nowadays, it is becoming popular also as the physical layer for industrial communications, thanks to its reliability and widespread diffusion. The actual cutting edge is a minimum cycle time in the order of 100 mus and a jitter of 1 mus. Innovative instruments are needed to cope with these performances: usually they are high cost laboratory devices not suitable to be adopted in industrial environment. In this paper a PLD based instrument is proposed: it can be easily transported to an ASIC platform allowing for the implementation of a rugged low cost instrument. A prototype has been realized to verify feasibility and performances