Time Stamp Unit

Overview

The TSU consists of a timer and registers to capture the time at which PTP event frames cross the message timestamp point. An interrupt is issued when a capture register is updated.

The 1588 time stamp unit (TSU) is implemented as a 94-bit timer.

The 46 lower bits roll over when they have counted to 1s. An interrupt is generated when the seconds increment. The timer increments by a programmable period (to approximately 15.2fs resolution) with each MCK period. The timer value can be read, written and adjusted with 1ns resolution (incremented or decremented) through the APB interface.

Timer Adjustment

The amount by which the timer increments each clock cycle is controlled by the Timer Increment register (GMAC_TI). Bits [7:0] are the default increment value in nanoseconds. Additional 16 bits of sub-nanosecond resolution are available using the Timer Increment Sub-Nanoseconds register (GMAC_TISUBN). If the rest of the register is written with zero, the timer increments by the value in [7:0], plus the value of the GMAC_TISUBN for each clock cycle.

The GMAC_TISUBN allows a resolution of approximately 15fs.

Bits [15:8] of the increment register are the alternative increment value in nanoseconds, and bits [23:16] are the number of increments after which the alternative increment value is used. If [23:16] are zero the alternative increment value will never be used.

Taking the example of 10.2MHz, there are 102 cycles every 10µs or 51 cycles every 5µs. So a timer with a 10.2MHz clock source is constructed by incrementing by 98ns for fifty cycles and then incrementing by 100ns (98ns × 50 + 100ns = 5000ns). This is programmed by writing the value 0x00326462 to the Timer Increment register (GMAC_TI).

In a second example, a 49.8 MHz clock source requires 20ns for 248 cycles, followed by an increment of 40ns (20ns × 248 + 40ns = 5000ns). This is programmed by writing the value 0x00F82814 to the GMAC_TI register.

The Number of Increments bit field in the GMAC_TI register is 8 bit in size, so frequencies up to 50MHz are supported with 200kHz resolution.

Without the alternative increment field the period of the clock would be limited to an integer number of nanoseconds, resulting in supported clock frequencies of 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200 and 250 MHz.

There are eight additional 80-bit registers that capture the time at which PTP event frames are transmitted and received. An interrupt is issued when these registers are updated. The TSU timer count value can be compared to a programmable comparison value. For the comparison, the 48 bits of the seconds value and the upper 22 bits of the nanoseconds value are used. A signal (GTSUCOMP) is output from the core to indicate when the TSU timer count value is equal to the comparison value stored in the TSU timer comparison value registers (GMAC_NSC, GMAC_SCL, and GMAC_SCH). The GTSUCOMP signal can be routed to the Timer peripheral to automatically toggle pin TIOA11/PD21. This can be used as the reference clock for an external PLL to regenerate the audio clock in Ethernet AVB.An interrupt can also be generated (if enabled) when the TSU timer count value and comparison value are equal, mapped to bit 29 of the interrupt status register.