Design of a Highly Reliable Redundant Network Card Supporting the IEEE1588 Protocol

To adapt to the digital and intelligent trend of ship management and meet the requirements of shipborne industrial Ethernet with high reliability and strong real-time performance, this paper develops a shipboard redundant network card with a Zynq7000 series SoC chip as the main controller, and designs the IEEE1588 IP core and PRP IP core on the FPGA side of SoC. The design of the IEEE1588 IPCore can avoid the impact of the jitter of the upper layer protocol stack on the time stamp accuracy; the PRP IPCore implements dual-network redundancy on the FPGA side, reducing the software overhead of the Ethernet protocol stack on the ARM side, and lowers the impact of network switching on synchronization accuracy. Through testing, the point-to-point synchronization accuracy of the network card is better than 50 ns, and the dual-network redundancy switch can be quickly completed when the network is disconnected. The design of the network card greatly improves the consistency and accuracy of the internal time of the ship system, and meets the requirements for high reliability, fast fault switching and recovery.