Sharing a common sense of time

We outline three architectures for establishing system timing used in both the general computing environment and in the more specialized environment of test, measurement, and industrial control. Increasingly tight synchronization requirements and the trend to more distributed and peer-to-peer applications have led to the development of the IEEE 1588 standard as a means of establishing a precise common sense of time in the test, measurement, and industrial control environment. We suggest some of the ways in which this common sense of time may be exploited in time-based measurement and control applications. It is shown that sub-microsecond synchronization accuracy is readily achieved using the protocol.