Agilent intros M8000 series of BER test solutions

Agilent Technologies has introduced a Bit Error Ratio (BER) test solution for developers and system integrators of multi-gigabit network equipment. The M8000 enables developers to characterise and validate Physical Layer designs and to perform compliance testing in this segment.

Supporting a wide range of data rates and standards, the instrument helps accelerating insight into the performance margins of high-speed digital devices for computer, consumer, server, mobile computing and data centre products.

When R&D and validation teams characterise next-generation designs, they face multiple test challenges. First, the faster data rates of the emerging next-generation digital computer buses, such as PCI Express 4 (with a bit rate of 16 GT/s) and USB 3.1 (with a bit rate of 10 Gb/s), present new signal integrity test challenges. New 128/130bit and 128/132bit coding formats complicate error detection and loopback pattern creation.

In addition, widespread adoption of mobile computing devices means more and more R&D and test engineers need to test different implementations of MIPI ports, with new data formats, termination models, multiple lanes and built-in error counting.

Lastly, with the enormous surge in data-centre traffic, servers and storage designs must support much higher bandwidths on their backplane and networking ports. Data rates of 25 Gb/s and more on multiple lanes over PC boards, cable or optical interconnects are required by most industry standards, such as 100GbE, CEI and Fibre Channel. Testing such 25-Gb/s receiver ports requires new test capabilities to characterise device tolerance for interference, channel losses and crosstalk. The M8000 Series instruments enable R&D and test engineers to master these challenges, said Agilent.

The first model in the new M8000 Series is the J-BERT M8020A that offers built-in jitter injection, 8-tap de-emphasis, interference sources, reference clock multiplication, clock recovery and equalisation. "It enables fast and accurate receiver characterisation of single- and multi-lane devices operating at data rates up to 16 Gb/s and 32 Gb/s."

The J-BERT M8020A BERT supports one to four BERT channels and offers data rates of up to 8.5 Gb/s and 16 Gb/s with an extension to 32 Gb/s. It is based on AXIe standard. The M8020A is controlled from a user interface via USB. All options are upgradeable.