Integrated Protocol Viewer for Automated PCI Express Testing

09 September 2011 – Agilent Technologies announced the industry’s first fully integrated protocol viewing application for PCI Express 3.0. The software combines packet viewing and analog waveform annotation with advanced packet and symbol searching capabilities in a single oscilloscope-based tool.

The software helps engineers identify protocol errors and simultaneously analyze analog waveform characteristics. This capability helps engineers developing PCI Express 3.0-based products address potential issues early in the design cycle and get their products to market faster.

The 8 GT/s operating speed of PCIe 3.0 devices causes significant signal integrity challenges for designers. Often, signal integrity problems occur intermittently, and they may present themselves as errors in protocol behavior.

The Agilent N8816A PCI Express 3.0 protocol viewer software provides time-correlated views of physical and transaction layer errors. The software performs 128/130 bit decoding on PCI Express 3.0 traffic and displays serial packet data synchronized with the analog view of the PCI Express 3.0 waveform using only an oscilloscope. The decoded waveform is displayed directly on the analog waveform and in a list format with associated time and index information. This combination of simultaneous logical and analog views of PCI Express 3.0 data allows engineers to quickly isolate signal-integrity-related causes of intermittent protocol errors, reducing aggravation and saving time compared to doing the same task with a protocol-only tool.

The Agilent N8816A PCI Express 3.0 protocol viewer software for Infiniium 90000 Series oscilloscopes provides design and validation engineers with packet-level decode for PCI Express symbols and offers detailed packet decoding and visibility of low-level packet content.