Telecommunications | Introspect Technology

As the world enters a new era of constant connectivity, consumer demand for faster, unfailing connections is driving rapid innovation within the telecommunications industry. The types of telecommunications networks are extensive and include channels that are both wired (Ethernet, optical fiber, backplane, etc.) and wireless (cellular wireless, Wi-Fi, broadband, etc.).

This means that test and measurement technology must be capable of evaluating various transmission signals, especially at the physical media attachment layers. Every telecommunications system fundamentally trickles down to an underlying SerDes technology and Introspect Technology’s tools and expertise are indispensable for the design and validation of such systems. Whether you need to validate the physical layer or to create emulation or final test platforms, Introspect Technology will provide the necessary coverage.

Memory Interfaces

More data; big data; the explosion of data — everyone is talking about data. In today’s Information Age, we are accumulating more and more data every day — almost more data than we know what to do with and more data than we have storage for. In this data abundance paradigm, memory interfaces have become a key area of focus for research and development engineers. Whether it is for cloud storage, deep neural network processing, or mobile handset storage, a memory interface is critical for ensuring proper data storage and retrieval.

There are many different memory interfaces, from DDR to SerDes based, but they all share the common theme of implementing quite a large bandwidth and a large number of transmission channels. Both of these implementation requirements have created a conundrum for test and validation engineers focusing on memory interfaces: use conventional low-channel solutions that provide very limited test coverage or create custom solutions that are difficult to maintain and that detract from the main mission of designing the interface itself. Introspect Technology offers the highest channel count test and measurement solutions that have been optimized for memory interface testing and that have become indispensable in the development of technologies such as DDR5 and SerDes based memory.

Chip to Chip Communications

In order to enable new data-intensive and compute-intensive applications such as machine learning or edge computing, data center servers are currently undergoing major architectural and technology changes. For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are now built using hardware accelerators that contain hybrid processing units (microprocessors paired with FPGAs are a typical example).

This has created huge demand for short-reach chip-to-chip interfaces with individual channels running at 28 Gbps or 56 Gbps. While these links often build on existing protocols, they are creating increasingly unique challenges for test and measurement. For example, they often require extremely short reaches and some proprietary protocol features.

Introspect Technology’s C Series and M Series products are ideal for chip-to-chip communications testing because they are ultra-compact and can emulate a system environment more easily than conventional tools. Additionally, Introspect Technology’s products offer the highest lane count solutions in the industry, thus enhancing coverage and ensuring complete system-oriented testing.

400G and PAM4

As a result of the proliferation of cloud computing in the twenty-first century, end users are demanding faster and higher performing cloud computing infrastructure. In turn, this demand for faster data transmission is fueling a data center migration to 400G technology. The focus of 400G today is transitioning the modulation scheme of high-speed Ethernet standards to be based on PAM4 instead of NRZ.

This allows for transmitting double the data bits within the same time interval, thus reducing the strain on the already congested interconnection media.

Introspect Technology has created a family of revolutionary PAM4 test pattern generators and analyzers. True to our philosophy of creating ultra-compact, ultra-flexible tools with the ability to do receiver stress testing and the ability to create signal impairments, all of our PAM4 products contain per-channel analog controls, per-channel digital error insertion and analysis, and per-channel jitter/voltage impairment generation. In short, Introspect Technology’s PAM4 solutions are the most capable in the industry while still being compact and cost-effective.

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Memory Interfaces

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Chip to Chip Communications

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400G and PAM4

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