Picosecond-Grade Clocking for Smart Factories: Interferometric Sensing Meets Adaptive Consensus

• Mohammed Faizan

  Author

Deterministic production lines, TSN backbones, and coordinated motion systems demand clock alignment beyond conventional PTP; this paper introduces a hybrid scheme that fuses interferometry-based timing extraction with an adaptive consensus protocol to deliver sub-100 ps synchronization across distributed controllers. A mathematically grounded design establishes stability margins and optimal convergence rates, while the implementation spans simulation, SDR-based emulation, and FPGA-based hardware testbeds (Raspberry Pi 4 with Xilinx Artix-7 timestamping modules) to validate precision, speed, and resilience under loss, interference, and adversarial behavior. Experiments achieve 13.5±2.1 ps time error and 1.5× faster convergence versus White Rabbit PTP (2.3× versus standard PTP), with reduced message overhead and graceful degradation up to one-third faulty nodes, supporting large-scale factory networks. For automation engineers, the takeaway is a deployable timing layer that sharpens TSN schedules, tightens robot and vision triggers, and scales to thousand-node plants using commodity hardware.

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