Software tests products' compliance with eight popular, high-speed serial protocols
By Dan Strassberg, Contributing Technical Editor -- EDN, January 1, 2007
LeCroy Corp's Windows-based QualiPHY, a hardware and software serial-data-compliance-test application, works with any of the company's 2-GHz or higher bandwidth real-time or sampling digital oscilloscopes and protocol analyzers. Designed for high-speed protocols such as SATA (serial advanced-technology attachment), FB-DIMM (fully buffered dual-in-line-memory module), UWB (ultrawideband), Ethernet, USB, PCI Express, SAS (serial-attached small-computer-systems interface) and HDMI (high-definition-multimedia interface), the package provides digital- and analog-hardware engineers with an automated compliance-test tool for developing and validating devices' PHY (physical) layers in accordance with documents published by the applicable standards organizations and special-interest groups.
QualiPHY features an intuitive graphical user interface that supports the industry's most popular serial-data standards and is common among them, eliminating the need for developers to learn new software for each project. Moreover, the expandable, modular architecture allows easy addition of support for more standards and suits the package to testing in such industry segments as computers and computer equipment, wireless and mobile multiservice (voice/data) products and systems, cable and IPTV (Internet-protocol television) set-top boxes, and vending and gaming machines. The package's developers also had today's global-design environment in mind. A development team can conduct tests anywhere in the world through the supported scopes' IEEE 488 or LAN/WAN (local/wide-area network) connections, which permit live access to signals from scopes in remote locations.
By incorporating an application framework that enables users to save every experimental result to an XML (extensible markup language)-formatted record, the product goes beyond mere reporting and tabulating of test results. The software offers a choice of automatic HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), PDF (portable-document-format), or RTF (rich-text-format) report generation. The reports contain tabulated numerical values for each test. This approach benefits IC developers, who require comprehensive wafer and die characterization to define parametric performance and establish device-performance capability; system-level-validation teams that work in parallel development cycles and must combine, study, and interpret performance data and correlate test results with earlier runs; and manufacturing and production test, which use control charts and other performance indicators to monitor key parameters.
QualiPHY prices range from $2995 each for versions that support USB and Ethernet to $6995 for the version that supports UWB. All versions accommodate modules that add support for more standards.
