Rick Green 200

Digital design and measurement is one focus of restructured Keysight

Jan. 25, 2016

Santa Clara, CA. Keysight Technologies has recently completed its first year as an independent company, posting $2.9 billion revenue for its fiscal year 2015. The company has 10,200 employees and serves customers in more than 100 countries.

Last November 3, the company announced a new organizational structure to better serve those customers. During an interview at DesignCon January 20, Brad Doerr, senior R&D manager for the company’s Oscilloscope and Protocol Division, commented on that reorganization as well as on the digital design and measurement technologies that would be of interest to DesignCon attendees.

The new customer-focused business groups include the Communications Solutions Group, the Industrial Solutions Group, and the Services Solutions Group—all coordinated with a centralized corporate planning and technology team. The structure, Doerr said, focuses the company, its processes, and its people directly on customers and the development of those solutions those customers need to succeed in automotive electronics, wireless base stations, computers, cloud devices and interfaces, smartphones, avionics, surveillance, radar, and satellites.

Doerr cited standards expertise as a key component of Keysight’s ability to serve its customers. Keysight dedicates individuals to DisplayPort, USB, HDMI, and MIPI as well as standards related to memory, computers, optical computing, optical WAN, and storage.

Doerr then focused on the digital design technologies it was highlighting at DesignCon. Those technologies embrace design and simulation (including product concept, system specification, and prototype and simulation), analysis and debug (including turn-on and stabilization; debug, validation, and characterization); and compliance. Products extend from EDA tools and physical-layer test software to BERTs, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and protocol analyzers and exercisers.

At DesignCon, Doerr said, Keysight was highlighting the USB Type-C ecosystem, signal and power integrity, PAM-4 and 100G/400G data-center standards, and test and validation of the latest generation of PCIe and DDR/LPDDR standards.

One particular product on display at DesignCon was the new, comprehensive N8833A and N8833B crosstalk analysis application. The application not only detects and quantifies the presence of crosstalk, but it can determine which aggressors are primarily responsible. Furthermore, the application can go one step further by actually removing the crosstalk from the victim waveform so engineers can visually compare the original waveform with the clean waveform side-by-side. Engineers can also compare the results from other scope analysis tools, such as real-time eye diagrams or jitter analysis.

The crosstalk analysis application can help engineers determine the margins the design would recover without the crosstalk. It can also help determine if a signal that fails design specification could pass without the crosstalk, thereby helping engineers best apply their efforts.

The crosstalk analysis application can analyze up to four signals (aggressors or victims) at the same time. The application can handle different types of crosstalk including transmission-line near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT) as well as power-supply aggressors, including power-supply-induced jitter (PSIJ). The crosstalk-removed waveform can then be used with oscilloscope tools, such as E2688A SDA eye-diagram analysis, N5400A EZJIT Plus jitter analysis software, N5465A InfiniiSim de-embedding tool, and N5461A serial data equalization software.

Also on display were the new Keysight N8836A PAM-4 analysis software (for S-Series, 90000A, V-Series, and 90000 X- and Z-Series oscilloscopes) and N1085A PAM-4 analysis software (for 86100D oscilloscopes). These tools  provide comprehensive characterization of electrical PAM-4 signals based on the Optical Internetworking Forum’s Common Electrical Interface (OIF-CEI 4.0) proposed 56G interfaces, and the emerging IEEE 400 Gigabit Ethernet (P802.3bs) standard.

The software supports linearity and output voltage measurements including level separation mismatch ratio (RLM), eye width (EW) and eye height (EH) measurements, jitter measurements including even-odd jitter and clock random jitter, and differential- and common-mode return loss measurements—performed using a Keysight time domain reflectometer (TDR) or vector network analyzer (VNA).

Here are other some key products and technologies that were on display:

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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