12 Jan 2012

Tektronix introduces high-speed serial protocol test platform

Tektronix has introduced a protocol test platform that allows engineers to analyse, stimulate, stress and characterise high-speed serial links, with support for speeds up to 10Gb/s.

With the new TPI4000, engineers can use one instrument to perform multiple test functions and to look at a variety of protocols such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI), and Serial Front Panel Data Port (FPDP).

With the broad acceptance of high-speed serial interfaces engineers are looking to complement oscilloscopes with protocol analysers that can provide insight into the information that is being transferred across the physical layer.

Users of high-speed serial protocols need to perform a number of tests, including interoperability and compatibility testing, performance optimization and stress testing. The TPI4000 Series provides a single instrument that can be configured to perform each of these tasks and more.

The TPI4000 Series consists of two models. The TPI4202 is a portable unit with a built-in monitor and keyboard and supports up to 8 ports. The TPI4208 is a 4U rack-mount unit that supports up to 32 ports.

In a single hardware platform, the TPI4000 can be configured by the user to be any combination of protocol analyser, traffic generator, system stress tester, or BER (bit error rate) tester. This eliminates the need to buy separate test tools for each of these functions.

Tektronix also claims the TPI4000 can also support any combination of protocols simultaneously and be reconfigured by the user to support different protocols. Multiple protocol support allows user to troubleshoot system-level problems while the ability to reconfigure the TPI4000 to support different protocols reduces total test cost.

High-speed serial protocols supported by the TPI4000 Series include Fibre Channel (FICON, AS1760, ASM, FC-AE-1553, others), Ethernet (iSCSI, FCoE, TCP/IP, IPv6, iFCP, AFDX, ARINC664, TTE, others), Serial Front Panel Data Port (Serial FPDP), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Serial ATA (SATA), Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) and Serial RapidIO (SRIO).

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