Study and Implementation of Ethernet Based Synchronization in Distributed Data Acquisition System

In the recent past, acoustic detection and ranging techniques has become more advanced and sophisticated. In general, the sonar systems consist of distributed data acquisition systems. For accurate ranging these systems needs to be synchronized in time. This can be achieved by custom synchronization techniques or through standard mechanisms like IEEE 1588 PTP (precision time protocol). This project outlines the implementation of a synchronization mechanism with minimal hardware support. The main objective is that it will minimize custom hardware requirements. Using a standard hardware interface like Ethernet will rule out any signal integrity related issues at the physical layer. The accuracy of synchronization across the systems has to be measured and tuned. The implementation will be done on the Microzed board using the Vivado 2018.1.