Post a Comment
News and New Products
12.5-Gbps serial BERT characterizes jitter
By Dan Strassberg -- EDN, 10/31/2005
Agilent has announced a high-performance serial BERT (bit-error-ratio tester) with jitter-generation capabilities for jitter-tolerance testing of serial devices at speeds to 12.5 Gbps. The N4903A J-BERT provides jitter-tolerance testing for fast, high-quality characterization of next-generation serial devices.
According to Agilent, industry experts expect the next generation of high-speed serial-bus standards with data rates of 5 Gbps and more to emerge by 2006. The increasing speed will cause significant signal-integrity and jitter issues during the design and test of new serial-bus devices. In addition, new transmission techniques, such as spread-spectrum clocking, will make characterizing device performance more difficult and time-consuming. The N4903A complies with the latest serial-bus standards and provides calibrated jitter-composition measurement and automated jitter characterization in a single box. The unit provides complete calibrated jitter-composition measurement for stressed-eye testing of receivers. Automated and compliant jitter-tolerance testing covers popular serial-bus standards, such as PCI Express, SATA (serial advanced-technology attachment), Fibre Channel, FB-DIMM (fully buffered dual-in-line-memory module), CEI (common electrical interface), Gigabit Ethernet, and XFP (10-Gbps small-form-factor pluggable module).
“Jitter-tolerance testing is the most complex and time-consuming measurement that design teams of next-generation serial devices have to deal with,” says Siegfried Gross, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Digital Verification Solutions Division. Agilent spokesmen claim that the unit is the first and only complete, one-box jitter-tolerance tester.
The Agilent N4903A high-performance serial BERT includes built-in, automated, calibrated, and compliant jitter-tolerance testing with sources of intersymbol and sinusoidal interference, as well as periodic, random, and bounded, uncorrelated jitter. These capabilities enable fast, precise stressed-eye testing with more than 50% eye closure.
The instrument fully supports serial buses’ complex data patterns. With the bit-recovery mode, it can analyze unpredictable traffic, enabling more realistic test scenarios. A new pattern sequencer speeds test development by simplifying the setup of complex training sequences. Other features include built-in clock-data recovery; new subrate-clock outputs; spread-spectrum clocking, which significantly simplifies the clock setup; and accurate characterization with the cleanest eyes, 20-psec transition times, and 50-mV analyzer sensitivity. Prices start at $120,000 for the 7-Gbps version and $160,000 for the 12.5-Gbps version.
Agilent Technologies, www.agilent.com/find/n4903.
