Test & Measurement


Simulator speeds eye measurements

18 March 2009 Test & Measurement

Agilent has introduced a million-bit-per-minute signal integrity Channel Simulator for multigigabit chip-to-chip data link design.

The Channel Simulator – part of Agilent’s advanced design system (ADS) EDA software platform – allows an interactive eye measurement from channel simulations inside the ADS signal integrity design and analysis environment.

With a throughput that is a thousand times faster than SPICE, with this system it is practical to make changes to the channel or the transmit-and-receive equalisation and see eye measurement results instantaneously. The most common applications for the ADS Channel Simulator are design and verification of chip-to-chip multigigabit-per-second serial links. At the very high data rates at which these links operate, signal-integrity engineers must take into account physical phenomena such as impedance mismatch, reflections, electromagnetic coupling, crosstalk and microwave frequency attenuation due to the skin effect and dielectric loss tangent.

The system allows signal integrity engineers to address these challenges by performing 'what-if' design space exploration. To aid this workflow, the simulator uses impulse response analysis to automatically extract a fast, linear FIR model from any combination of ADS circuit-level and physical-level components. This results in simulation throughputs of more than a million bits per minute. Fast eye measurement lets signal-integrity engineers interactively produce the resulting eye measurements – and optimise transmit and receive equalisation – in serial links such as PCI Express(r), USB 3.0 and 10-gigabit Ethernet.



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