July 9, 2014. Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced a test solution for characterizing USB 3.1 receivers. Using the Agilent USB 3.1 receiver test set, design and test engineers in the semiconductor and computer industry can now accurately characterize and verify USB 3.1 receiver ports in ASICs and chipsets.
USB interfaces are commonly used in today’s PCs, tablets, mobile phones, and external storage devices. The new USB 3.1 specification was released by the USB Implementers Forum in 2013, and the first USB 3.1 10-Gb/s-capable products are expected to reach the market in 2014. The USB 3.1 specification more than doubles possible throughput compared with the USB 3.0 specification. This throughput improvement was achieved by doubling the physical data rate from 5 to 10 Gb/s and by changing the coding scheme from 8-bit/10-bit to 128-bit/132-bit, which requires significantly less overhead.
“Agilent’s new USB 3.1 receiver test solution fills a critical need for ASIC and chipset designers needing to quickly deliver the next generation of USB-enabled devices,” said Juergen Beck, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Digital & Photonic Test Division. “With our expertise in accurate receiver tolerance testing, we continue to help R&D teams efficiently release robust, next-generation chipsets for the semiconductor and computer industry.”
R&D and test engineers who design and test USB 3.1 chipsets are facing new challenges. For receiver test, the doubled physical data rate means the margins for signal integrity are tighter. To ensure proper operation, the receiver must tolerate a mix of different jitter types. Three-tap de-emphasis is required to compensate for the losses of the channel. And finally, the analyzer must be able to filter 128-bit/132-bit coded skip-ordered sets with variable length during error counting.
The price for the J-BERT M8020A high-performance BERT starts at $122,200 for a one-channel, 16-Gb/s high-performance BERT with built-in clock recovery. The upgradeable J-BERT N4903B (the new option for analyzing 128b/132b-coded patterns) is priced at $12,500. The J-BERT requires software version 7.60 or later.