•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

Software executes complete SATA test suite

Under PC control, 153 tests chart route to SATA-2 product compliance

Tektronix has made a number of announcements around its instrumentation for high-speed serial links. For designers working with the Serial-ATA Gen-2 physical layer, the TekExpress compliance-test automation framework and SATA automated compliance test software provide a complete compliance test suite to verify a product’s compliance to the standard, and assure its inter-operability with other SATA devices. Tek built the software on National Instruments’ TestStand product; it executes all of the tests – there are 153 – required by the SATA-IO working group’s Methods-of-Implementation document. Test time is reduced to under 3 hours, Tek says; the company anticipates the package will find applications in test houses and in pre-compliance testing. Compliance modules are divided into six for “hosts/devices” and one for “cables”. Hardware needed to run the test suite comprises a DSA70000 digital serial analyser (high bandwidth real-time oscilloscope), AWG7102 arbitrary waveform generator, and a DSA8200 digital serial analyser, also a high bandwidth ‘scope, but a sampling one. You will also need an RF switch, an instrument Tek does not manufacture – the company specifies one by Keithley. Once you have the hardware, the software framework costs €4,140, and the individual MOI test modules range from €4,990 to €16,800.
At the same time there are new serial analysers for PCI Express 1.0 and 2.0 designs, TLA7S16 and ’08, that provide PCIe 2.0 protocol information along with cross-bus analysis. The instruments can track PCIe’s feature of dynamically adding or shedding lanes to or from a link, depending on traffic demands, to conserve power; you can use the cross-bus feature to correlate activity with transactions on, say, a memory bus. The analysers are matched with a set of half-width (P6708 and full-width (P6717) mid-bus probes, and slot-interposers for where no access to PCIe tracking is possible.
Further introductions add serial data link analysis, with equalisation and channel emulation features, for the DSA8200 instrument (software package 80SJNB); and a software offering to run on high-speed oscilloscopes, DPOJET. This will provide jitter and eye diagram analysis for standards that include PCIe, HDMI and DisplayPort.