Advanced serial data receiver test solution
30 April 2008
Test & Measurement
Tektronix has announced the availability of SerialXpress, an advanced new software package that performs direct synthesis of waveforms for high-speed serial data receiver testing, suitable for testing SATA, SAS, PCI-Express, HDMI and DisplayPort serial data standards, as well as any other serial bus technology operating at speeds up to 6 Gbps.
SerialXpress manages the creation of these waveforms for high-speed transmission on the AWG7000 Arbitrary Waveform Generator series. An easy to use interface provided by the software package makes the creation and management of high-speed serial waveforms highly intuitive. The AWG7000 with SerialXpress software is said to be the world's first one-box high-speed serial data signal generator for receiver stress and BER testing, eliminating the need for multiple instruments and complicated test configurations.
Next generation high-speed serial standards ranging from 3 to 6 Gbps have diminishing timing margins that require receiver characterisation to complement conventional transmitter testing. Increases in transmission speeds and trace length of transmission lines heighten the potential for errors in the signal path. Engineers need to simulate these effects during the design phase to test the tolerance of their receiver designs. SerialXpress software provides these capabilities working in tandem with the AWG7000 arbitrary waveform generators through use of direct synthesis. Direct synthesis is a flexible and repeatable method for creating ideal or impaired waveforms incorporating periodic and random jitter, pre/de-emphasis, channel emulation, idle-states and SSC parameters. This often eliminates the need for multiple test instruments such as sine wave generators, noise generators, power dividers and power combiners that not only complicate the entire test set-up but also require extensive calibration.
Engineers are able to simply recall a set-up file that encapsulates all of the relevant standard mandated tests and signal impairments, without the need for any additional external components or mixing required, reducing complexity and cost. To replicate the test scenarios across multiple labs, AWG set-up file deployment can be managed through electronic circulation of files, enabling test systems worldwide to have consistent settings and capabilities and with no external hardware dependencies.
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