Eye on Standards
In Eye on Standards, Ransom Stephens will be tracking the developments with current, evolving, new, and emerging technology standards and what they mean for you, the test engineer. From the IEEE to ANSI, IEC, and consortiums such as LXI, PXIe, USB, and others, Stephens will be there to help you close the ‘eye’ on your next test project.
Does OIF have to do everything?
Is there a paranoid conspiracy among the producers of technology standard specifications? Was I once a co-conspirator? Did they give me a mind wipe when I stopped working for The Man?Why do spec’s leave gaping holes? Is there some political or legal reason that they don’t want to commit? Is this why a 3rd party has to come in? Is it a liability thing? The Optical Internetworking Foru ...... Read More
Comments (0)Peace at the plugfest
Two engineers walk into a plugfest. Each one is convinced that they’re bringing definitive bad news: proof that an important principle of the specification won’t work. And not only won’t work, but can’t work. The task at hand is data transmission at 25 Gb/s on backplanes. Of course, being engineers, they’re both a bit smug. After all, they’ve got a secret ...... Read More
Comments (0)Receiver Tolerance Testing – with crosstalk!
Like I said in my last post, “Deterministic Jitter for High Speed Serial Receiver Tolerance Testing,” the idea behind stressed-receiver tolerance testing is to subject a receiver to the worst case compliant input signal and see if it can operate at the maximum allowed BER (bit-error rate), usually 1E-12. The thinking is that if the receiver can operate at the maximum allowed BER unde ...... Read More
Comments (0)Deterministic Jitter for High Speed Serial Receiver Tolerance Testing
The idea behind receiver tolerance testing is to submit the receiver to “the worst case but compliant” stress. If it can operate under those conditions, the thinking goes, then it can interoperate with any compliant transmitter + channel combination. Standard applied stresses include some or all of these: a stress-inducing pattern, worst case rise/fall times, transmitter deemphasis, ...... Read More
Comments (0)Top ten reasons to love (and hate) 100 Gigabit Ethernet
Before I list the reasons to be excited by the prospect of implementing 100 Gigabit Ethernet and developing its components, let me lay out its essential aspects. There are two topologies: 10×10 and 4×25; 10×10 has ten separate 10 Gb/s lanes and 4×25 has four at 25 Gb/s. By “10 Gb/s” and “25 Gb/s” I’m referring to the payload. The actual transm ...... Read More
Comments (4)Serial standards keep test engineers on edge...
…the cutting edge, that is. Clocks are embedded. Measurements of the jitter alphabet soup never seem to agree. Good old logic buses have become waveguides. Bit-error-rate contour measurements look like tie-dye designs. And the eye is as closed as the box office in Green Bay the day after the Giants visited. In the last decade, HSS (high-speed-serial) specifications have taken us on a thrill ...... Read More
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