Out in Front: September 2, 1996

Hewlett-Packard and VMEtro, two leaders in PCI-specific instrumentation, are enhancing their lines of tools for verifying and debugging boards and chips that interface with the PCI bus. HP is offering the $6900 E2925A, a 32-bit, 33-MHz PCI exerciser and analyzer. The company is also offering two graphical-user-interface software packages for Windows 95 and NT: The $2950 E2970A controls the E2925A's analyzer functions; the $4950 E2971A controls the E2925A's exerciser functions. HP is aiming the products at engineers who characterize and verify the performance of PCI devices.

The E2925A features a programmable master and target with low- and high-level control of protocol and traffic behavior for traffic emulation and debugging. The unit also offers programmable configuration space and expansion EEPROM; 128 kbytes of partitionable memory and I/O space, or both; a programmable interrupt generator; a PCI protocol monitor that checks for 32 rules in real time; and a C application-programming interface that lets you access the exerciser and analyzer functions from your own software, which can run on the system under test or on an external PC.

VMEtro's new product, the $6495 PTIMBAT-PB, is both a timing analyzer and an anomaly trigger. The board piggybacks onto VMEtro's PBT-315 PCI bus analyzers, which cost $6990 with a 32k-frame trace buffer and $8990 with a 128k-frame buffer. You can obtain just the anomaly-trigger functions or just the timing-analyzer functions of the PTIMBAT-PB on separate $3495 PBT-315 piggyback boards. The base PBT-315, which plugs into the PCI bus, is a special-purpose logic-state analyzer that you can use with 32- and 64-bit PCI buses at speeds as high as 200 MHz. The logic analyzer monitors 128 signals—91 from the PCI bus, eight from external sources, and a total of 29 time tags and utility bits. The stand-alone PBT-315 can use a dumb ASCII terminal or a PC as its user interface. For controlling the PBT-315 from a PC, VMEtro offers a $795 Windows-based software package called BusView.

HP's E2925A also plugs into the PCI bus. Although the system under test can sometimes run the user-interface software, the software normally runs on an external PC. Nevertheless, HP calls the E2925A a stand-alone device, because it incorporates a 32k-state bus analyzer, eliminating the need for a separate logic analyzer. For timing analysis, the E2925A uses an external logic analyzer, however.

—by Dan Strassberg

Hewlett-Packard Co, Santa Clara, CA. (800) 852-4844.

VMEtro Inc, Houston, TX. (713) 584-0728, fax (713) 584-9034.