Test & Measurement


PAM-4 analysis software for real-time scopes

1 July 2015 Test & Measurement

Keysight Technologies introduced measurement software designed to help engineers quickly and accurately characterise PAM-4 (pulse amplitude modulation with four amplitude levels) signals using the Keysight V-Series, Z-Series and S-Series real-time oscilloscope platforms.

Mobile computing applications are demanding more of the underlying computer Internet infrastructure. To enable increases in Internet and server farm performance, higher-speed connectivity among server systems is required. Conventional communication techniques often relied upon NRZ (non-return-to-zero) encoding.

Industry experts contend NRZ will not work in a 56 Gbps environment. One way to overcome this challenge is to change the modulation technique from NRZ to pulse amplitude modulation. This allows engineers to dramatically increase the amount of data they can send across high-speed digital communication links.

Several industry standards bodies are actively promoting PAM-4 technology to enable the next-generation speed class and push higher data rates for a given channel compared to traditional NRZ signalling. While PAM-4 technology leverages some traditional NRZ measurement algorithms for PAM-4 signals, to fully analyse system performance, unique PAM-4 measurements and parameters are required.

The N8827A (for the V- and Z-Series) and N8827B (for the S-Series) PAM-4 analysis software offers measurements such as eye width, eye height and eye skew; level amplitude, level noise and level skew; and amplitude level linearity. Engineers can combine the N8827A/B option with existing Infiniium real-time oscilloscope software tools to provide even more powerful analysis capability.



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