Montréal, Canada, September 30, 2013 — Introspect Technology, a leader in compact and embedded high-speed digital instrumentation, today announced a new category of product, the SV1C Personalized SerDes Tester, to address a much-needed gap in high-speed digital product engineering tools.
With ever-increasing product complexity and ever-shrinking development schedules, engineering teams today wrestle with unprecedented development and verification challenges, especially when working on products that feature a multitude of SerDes ports. The rapidly emerging need to constantly iterate on design and to constantly refine high-speed digital interface parameters for proper operation in system environments is severely straining human and capital resources, productivity and product quality.
A New Class of Product
The SV1C Personalized SerDes Tester is an ultra-portable, high-performance instrument that creates a new category of tool for high-speed digital product engineering teams. It integrates multiple technologies in order to enable the self-contained test and measurement of complex SerDes interfaces such as PCI Express Gen 3, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or MIPI M-PHY. Coupled with a seamless, easy-to-use development environment, this tool enables product engineers with widely varying skill sets to efficiently work with and develop SerDes verification algorithms. The SV1C fits in one hand and contains 8 independent stimulus generation ports, 8 independent capture and measurement ports and various clocking, synchronization and lane-expansion capabilities. It has been designed specifically to address the growing need of a parallel, system-oriented test methodology while offering world-class signal-integrity features such as jitter injection and jitter measurement.
Unprecedented Equipment Availability and New Applications
With a small form factor, an extensive signal-integrity feature set, and an exceptionally powerful software development environment, the SV1C is not only suitable for signal-integrity verification engineers that perform traditional characterization tasks, but it is also ideal for FPGA developers and software developers who need rapid turnaround signal verification tools or hardware-software interoperability confirmation tools. Whereas traditional instrumentation technology lacks the required throughput and flexibility to deal with such complex requirements, the SV1C truly enables applications and use-models that were not possible in the past. Product engineers can now spend their valuable time innovating on their interface control algorithms, addressing urgent debug challenges, or performing automated data collection tasks using their own personalized test sets. The SV1C integrates all the commonly needed functions such as digital data capture, bit error rate measurement, clock recovery, jitter decomposition and jitter generation.
Debug and data collection in one unified software suite
Designed for users with widely varying backgrounds and expertise, SV1C’s ESP Software environment provides a delightful user experience. It provides PC-based interaction with the hardware, thus accelerating debug tasks, while simultaneously offering powerful automation capability. The ESP software makes the SV1C system the ideal tool for engineers who want to seamlessly develop tests, debug devices and verify high-speed physical-layer (PHY) protocols in engineering, production and failure analysis.
Integrated device and instrument control – all at your desk
Traditional instrumentation approaches lack the sophistication required for SerDes link optimization at 12 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or even 5 Gbps. The SV1C Personalized SerDes Tester features multiple DUT control and communication interfaces such as JTAG, I2C and SPI thus allowing engineers to seamlessly interact with their DUT’s internal registers from within a single development environment consolidating test and setup into one convenient interface.
About Introspect Technology
Introspect Technology offers the most extensible measurement and optimization tools for high-speed digital product engineering teams worldwide. Our portable, software-defined instruments deliver unprecedented productivity enhancement throughout all stages of multi-GHz product development: from bring-up characterization, to system-level integration and optimization. Our mission is to enhance our customers’ competitiveness, product quality, and time-to-market.