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Test DisplayPort links for compliance

Martin Rowe- June 19, 2012

High-speed serieal buses are everywhere and they're getting faster. Thunderbolt is a computer bus that merges PCI

Express and DisplayPort technologies into a 10.3 Gbps link for consumer products. It uses two differential transmit/receive pairs in one cable. Because of the data rate and the fact that Thunderbolt runs over copper, the bus requires testing for parameters such as jitter, eye height, and eye width. To meet that need, Tektronix has introduced Thunderbolt Application Software that automates Thunderbolt transmitter compliance testing. The sofware runs on on the DSA70000D serial data analyzer oscilloscopes. Minimum bandwidth is 16 GHz with 20 GHz or more recmmended. The four channels let you see both differential channel pairs at once.

In addition to supporting the measurements specified in the DisplayPort 1.2 Performance Specification, the software suports the separation of bounded uncorrolated jitter, a problem that occurs as a result of crosstalk
that can occur with two transmission pairs in the same cable if not implemented peoperly.