Interchip Timing Synchronization using inexpensive MCUs - Making good use of phase adjustable timers

Christian Wenzel-Benner and Germano Brunacci presented this talk at the Embedded Software Engineering Kongress (ESE) in Sindelfingen, Germany in 2024.

Distributed systems often need a common time base in order to function correctly.
This applies to multichip embedded systems often found in cars, medical devices, home appliances, industrial and home automation...
However, the clock sources of the individual chips in the distributed system are not perfect and start drifting apart the moment the system starts up.
Correcting for this using software only, although inexpensive, tends to be imprecise.
Luckily the hardware building blocks for precise synchronization are becoming increasingly available even on inexpensive mass market MCUs (eg. Raspberry Pi Pico)
This video introduces a practical project example demonstrating how software can exploit common hardware features in order to achieve high-precision synchronization with minimum CPU load.
The development of the project example will be explained step by step, starting with a simplistic implementation and refining it incrementally.
Additionally a precise and efficient method for verifying synchronization quality will be shown.
This builds on the video presented at ESE 2023, knowledge of which is not required to understand this presentation.

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