Add ability to measure timing manager sensor data timing

[elsevers]

Abstract

Add ability to measure timing manager sensor data timing

Context

AMDC v1.3 added a timing manger to the AMDC which synchronizes the collection of sensor data to enable precision controls.

Functionality we wish we had

It would be useful from both a diagnostic and control perspective if the control task could have access to the timing information on when the sensor data is collected. Specifically:

• Time that sensor acquisition started (when the sensor trigger is initiated)
• Acquisition time of each sensor (how long it took for each of the sensors to acquire data)
• Time that the scheduler interrupt was asserted

From this information, a user could determine how old each of the acquired data samples is.

Currently implementation

The timing manager driver already allows a user to read the acquisition time of each sensor via timing_manager_get_time_per_sensor().

The timing manager does not currently have a driver function to provide the time that the sensor trigger is initiated. This is not even readable via the AXI bus. However, the verilog module has a register for this: count_time that could be made readable by the driver.

Approach

Create a PR that adds a new driver function to read the time that the timing manager sensor trigger occurs by reading count_time. To do this, we'll need to:

• Add count_time as an output to the timing_manager IP block
• Memory map the count_time register here. We recommend adding this to address 0xF (the slv_reg12-slv_reg15 values are unused, it is recommended to use slv_reg15 to allow for future growth of the sensor types), but it may be a good idea to first have a discussion on what additional sensors we wish to add to the timing manager.

Consider if additional driver functionality is needed.