SerialXpress® Creates Waveforms for Data Receiver Testing

Beaverton, Oregon based Tektronix is a leading supplier of test, measurement, and monitoring products, solutions and services for the communications, computer, and semiconductor industries -- as well as military/aerospace, consumer electronics, education and a broad range of other industries worldwide. The company has operations in 19 countries worldwide.

Tektronix developed SerialXpress, an advanced new software package that performs direct synthesis of waveforms for high-speed serial data receiver testing, ideal for testing SATA, SAS, PCI-Express, HDMI, and DisplayPort serial data standards, as well as any other serial bus technology operating at speeds up to 6 Gbps. SerialXpress manages the creation of these waveforms for high-speed transmission on the AWG7000 Arbitrary Waveform Generator series.

An easy to use interface provided by the SerialXpress software package makes the creation and management of high speed serial waveforms far more intuitive, eliminating the need for multiple instruments and complicated test configurations.

Next generation high-speed serial standards ranging from 3 to 6 Gb/s have diminishing timing margins that require receiver characterization to complement conventional transmitter testing. Increases in transmission speeds and trace length of transmission lines heighten the potential for errors in the signal path (channel). Engineers need to simulate these effects during the design phase to test the tolerance of their receiver designs.

SerialXpress software provides these capabilities working in tandem with the AWG7000 arbitrary waveform generators through use of direct synthesis. Direct synthesis is a flexible and repeatable method for creating ideal or impaired waveforms incorporating periodic & random Jitter, pre/de-emphasis, channel emulation, Idle-states, and SSC parameters. This often eliminates the need for multiple test instruments such as sine wave generators, noise generators, power dividers and power combiners that not only complicate the entire test set-up but also require extensive calibration.

Engineers are able to simply recall a setup file that encapsulates all of the relevant standard mandated tests and signal impairments, without the need for any additional external components or mixing required, reducing complexity and cost.

For more details, visit www.tek.com/serial_data