A major medical device development company set a goal to help magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) clinicians and doctors improve the quality of care they can give their patients. Part of reaching that goal required the development of a high-speed networking solution that would enhance the machine’s efficiency and accuracy now, while providing the flexibility to ease adaptation or improvements tomorrow.
The project required an experienced team that could develop both 1 Gbps and 25 Gbps Ethernet interfaces on the Xilinx RFSoC, using the 1588v2 standard for time synchronization. That’s when the company turned to DornerWorks, a Xilinx Alliance Program Premier Partner and one of the first companies in North America with development experience on the RFSoC.
DornerWorks engineers designed a system that sent and received data packets from a custom-configured PetaLinux environment, using 1588v2 PTP synchronization with hardware timestamps as either master or slave.
On the FPGA side, Xilinx IP provided the foundation for the Ethernet interfaces, both with 1588v2 hardware timestamping support. The 1588 clock was designed by DornerWorks and integrated into the final design, which was constrained to work on the RFSoC board.
Accommodating the system’s faster clock rate required careful consideration of how data was buffered and transferred while meeting timing requirements. The data stream speed was verified on fiber optic small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers.
The customer received the programmable logic, bitstream, and custom PetaLinux environment to enable their RFSoC networking solution, improve the performance of a critical piece of health system equipment, and improve the capabilities of healthcare workers as they care for their patients.
This system is now part of the customer’s newest MRI platform, while DornerWorks Ethernet reference design will be integrated throughout their product lines, allowing for fast and reliable transmission between devices.