Tektronix announces new addition to PCIe 3.0 test solution

BANGALORE, INDIA: Tektronix Inc. has announced a new addition to the industry’s most comprehensive solution for PCI Express 3.0.

The new offering provides physical layer transmitter (Tx) verification, debug, characterization and compliance testing using Tektronix DPO/DSA/MSO70000 Series oscilloscopes . With this release, Tektronix now offers the broadest and most complete set of physical and protocol layer measurement capabilities for PCI Express.

The PCIe 3.0 architecture provides a low-cost, high-performance I/O technology that includes a new 128b/130b encoding scheme and a data rate of 8 GT/s, doubling the interconnect bandwidth over PCIe 2.0. Based on the same board material (FR4) and connectors as previous generations, PCIe 3.0 represents a far more difficult test challenge with smaller margins and new jitter measurements required to account for increased signal loss in the channel.

The new Tektronix PCIe 3.0 solution (Option PCE3) builds on the success of PCIe Gen 1 and Gen 2 test solutions. Coupled with Serial Data Link Analysis (SDLA) software, it provides a complete solution for verifying transmitter and channel performance of PCIe 3.0 designs and provides support for both the PCIe 3 Base Specification and CEM Specification measurements.

"As the release of the PCIe 3.0 specification nears completion, the hard work of designing, testing and manufacturing silicon and other components that implement the specification is now in full swing," said Jim Pappas, Director of Technology Initiatives for Intel's Data Center Group.

"Due to the complexities of the physical layer within the PCIe 3.0 specification, electrical testing will play a major role to ensure the success and performance of motherboards, adaptor cards and other server-platform components. We value the success of the PCIe 3.0 architecture within the Enterprise market and recognize the contribution Tektronix makes by delivering electrical test solutions which enable the industry."

The electrical testing support provided by the new Option PCE3 solution complements the Tektronix TLA7SA16 and TLA7SA08 Logic Protocol Analyzer modules, bus support software, and probes announced earlier this year that bring PCIe 3.0 logical and protocol testing support to the TLA7000 Series high-performance logic analyzer family.