News - Board and System Test

I2C Bus Analyzer for Debugging and Performance Verification

17 April 2013 – Blackhawk announced the release of a new I2C bus analyzer product, dubbed Blackhawk Scribe. The Scribe represents Blackhawk’s first product introduction outside of its core JTAG emulation-based products. Combining an easy-to-use rich feature set with an affordable price, Scribe is well suited for both entry-level and complex I2C applications alike. The Scribe is ideal for embedded software and firmware development, hardware debug, and system performance verification.

Developers are able to monitor and log I2C bus traffic in real-time; all decoded I2C protocol data is displayed in an easily comprehended format. Hardware debugging features include exercising the I2C bus and communicating with its peripheral components which provides a convenient interface to “peek” and “poke” device registers while simultaneously watching traffic on the bus. In-System Programming (ISP) capabilities are also included to facilitate programming and verification of I2C compatible EEPROM devices using the Scribe's intuitive “single-click” interface to display and update memory contents.

“The I2C protocol bus has continued to grow in popularity because of its low cost and overhead, strong industry support, and ease of implementation. The Scribe has been specifically created to provide board designers and test engineers with inexpensive solutions equipped with an uncompromising feature set, outstanding performance, and exceptional reliability," states Andrew Ferrari, Director of DSP Operations at Blackhawk. "Engineers building products that incorporate I2C-enabled processors, such as those from Texas Instruments, will find the Scribe an invaluable aid in their development process. As such, we believe that the Scribe is a natural fit for existing Blackhawk customers as well as an opportunity for us to explore new markets."

The most prominent features of the Blackhawk Scribe are:

• Support for I2C and SMBus

• High-speed USB 2.0 interface

• Support for Standard-mode, Fast-mode, and Fast-mode Plus (Fm+) using bit rates up to 5 Mbit/s

• Support for High-speed mode (Hs-mode) monitoring up to 5 Mbit/s

• Non-intrusive traffic monitoring with unlimited time-stamped state and waveform recording,

message filtering, and symbolic translation

• Two general purpose I/O channels

• Programmable trigger event to highlight bus transactions of interest

• Automatic detection of bus voltage and signal thresholds

• Programmable bus voltage reference and pull-up resistors on the SDA and SCL lines

• In-System Programming of popular serial EEPROMs

• 64-Bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 software support

For the first 90 days, the Blackhawk Scribe is available at the special introductory price of $1,295, substantially lower than the regular list price of $1,600.

www.blackhawk-dsp.com/

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