Introduction
With the increasing need to accelerate deployments of solutions and reduce downtime, there is an increasing need to diagnose industrial Ethernet cables in a timely and effective manner. Time-domain reflectometry (TDR) enables developers to see through meters of copper and find opens, shorts, crosses and many more issues that can impact the reliability of industrial Ethernet communication in factory floors, process plants, logistics centers or even large indoor farming locations. This article covers the basics of TDR, including how to implement a relatively simple TDR-measurement setup without relying on a high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) or digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Also included is how the integration of such measurement setups into TI Ethernet physical-layer (PHY) devices can perform diagnostics directly.