Moxa and Xilinx Advance TSN

The collaboration holds great promise for enhancing network flexibility and interoperability on different levels of a TSN system.

Considered the new paradigm of industrial automation, TSN introduces deterministic, time-critical features on standard Ethernet and empowers the delivery of critical data to the right place at the right time in a converged and large-scale industrial network. The two partners plan to showcase the preliminary success of their collaboration with a demonstration of a unified Ethernet infrastructure with guaranteed Quality of Service and in deterministic low-latency conditions.

The promising features of TSN make it compelling to a wide range of applications that are widely applied in a variety of industries, including semiconductor, automobile manufacturing, machinery, food and beverage, chemical, electric power generation, and more. However, each TSN application has its specific requirements, and a substantial gap exists between TSN standards and application-specific TSN systems. Because of this challenge, both Moxa and Xilinx—two industry leaders in their respective yet complementary fields— want to fill the gap between the diverse TSN application requirements and TSN standards with the best possible real-time control and communications; thus, advancing TSN to create leading edge platforms and infrastructure for industrial automation.

“Being one of the pioneers in developing TSN standards, Moxa has contributed more than 30 years of OT expertise to building innovative industrial connectivity technologies and solutions through close collaboration with industry leaders,” said Zico Lee, Deputy General Manager of Moxa Networking. “Moxa is thrilled to collaborate closely with Xilinx to push TSN technology to the forefront in industrial automation with enhanced interoperability between bridge solutions and endpoints to address customers’ changing needs in control and latency-sensitive industrial applications, as well as for a larger vision for accelerating TSN eco-system development.”

The TSN standards, like any popular industry standards, keep evolving, and most TSN implementations based on dedicated chipsets have limited future-proof capabilities to address customers’ needs. Xilinx’s FPGAs are ideal to fix the flexibility issues brought by the ongoing evolution. The combination of adaptable, high-performance Xilinx FPGAs and Moxa’s TSN bridge solutions offer significant upgradability and reconfigurability to support the evolving standards and customer needs in the expansion of future applications.

"The launch of Moxa's TSN-G5000 Series bridge solutions is a milestone to make Industry 4.0 a reality,” said Chetan Khona, director, Industrial, Vision, Healthcare & Sciences at Xilinx. “Xilinx is the leader in scalable and embedded industrial IoT platforms, and we’re convinced that Time Sensitive Networking will be the undisputed standard for converged factory networks. Moxa is among the very first companies who combine highly reliable switching and deterministic transport, user-friendly interfaces and security to form a flexible and easy-to-manage product for factory floor applications. We are proud that our Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC product family makes this possible and we look forward to expanding our collaboration with Moxa."

Moxa and Xilinx will showcase a joint demonstration of TSN at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a government agency that defines the standards of the industrial Internet (a.k.a. the IIoT). In China, TSN is particularly considered a pioneering technology as the industrial Internet is a key sector of the nation’s ‘new infrastructure’ construction. The demonstration at CAICT convenes a list of industry leaders, including Moxa and Xilinx, to display the next-generation industrial Internet. 

The two companies will demonstrate a truly, unified Ethernet infrastructure in machine-to-machine real-time communications, enabled by Moxa’s bridge solutions featuring multiple TSN-G5000 Series switches and Avnet Ultrazed PCIe Carrier cards powered by Xilinx FPGAs. The joint demonstration will highlight how TSN prioritizes network traffic and ensures streams of closely synchronized data to be delivered on time, even in a congested network. The scenario also exemplifies how Moxa and Xilinx’s joint effort facilitate plug-and-produce manufacturing and future-proof capabilities in an interoperable and harmonized environment based on TSN.