Agilent Technologies has announced the Agilent USB 3.1 receiver test set for use by design and test engineers in the semiconductor and computer industry to accurately characterize and verify USB 3.1 receiver ports in ASICs and chipsets.
Released by the USB Implementers Forum in 2013 and expected to appear in products in 2014, the USB 3.1 specification more than doubles possible throughput compared to with the USB 3.0 specification, the company says. This throughput improvement was achieved by doubling the physical data rate from 5 to 10 Gb/s and by changing the coding scheme from 8-bit/10-bit to 128-bit/132-bit, which requires significantly less overhead.
The new Agilent USB 3.1 reciever test solution consists of either the J-BERT N4903B high-performance serial 12.5-Gb/s BERT with integrated jitter sources and ISI and the N4916B de-emphasis signal generator or the J-BERT M8020A high-performance 16-Gb/s BERT with integrated and calibrated jitter sources (random jitter, period jitter, SSC), 8-tap de-emphasis and M8048A ISI channels.
“Agilent’s new USB 3.1 receiver test solution fills a critical need for ASIC and chipset designers needing to quickly deliver the next generation of USB-enabled devices,” Juergen Beck, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Digital & Photonic Test Division, said. “With our expertise in accurate receiver tolerance testing, we continue to help R&D teams efficiently release robust, next-generation chipsets for the semiconductor and computer industry.”
Engineers who design and test USB 3.1 chipsets face a number of new challenges, the company says. For receiver test, the doubled physical data rate means the margins for signal integrity are tighter. To ensure proper operation, the receiver must tolerate a mix of different jitter types. Three-tap de-emphasis is required to compensate for the losses of the channel. And finally, the analyzer must be able to filter 128-bit/132-bit coded skip-ordered sets with variable length during error counting.
The new Agilent USB 3.1 receiver test solution provides a variety of benefits, including accurate and repeatable receiver test results enabled by J-BERT’s built-in and calibrated jitter sources and intersymbol interference (ISI) traces; precise emulation of pre- and post-cursor de-emphasis; built-in clock recovery to reduce setup complexity; and error counting accomplished by real-time filtering of the USB 3.1-specific 128-bit/132-bit coded skip-ordered sets, which can vary in length from the pattern stream.
