Judging jitter

Agilent Technologies has announced what it claims is industry's first high-performance serial bit error ratio tester with advanced jitter generation capabilities for jitter-tolerance testing (J-BERT) of serial gigabit devices up to 12.5 Gb/s.

The new Agilent N4903A is said to provide the only complete jitter-tolerance test solution for fast, high-quality characterisation of next-generation serial devices.

The next generation of high-speed serial bus standards with data rates of 5 Gb/s and beyond is expected by 2006. The increasing speed will cause significant signal integrity and jitter issues during the design and test of next-generation serial bus devices. In addition, new transmission techniques, such as spread spectrum clocking, make device performance characterisation more difficult and time-consuming. The Agilent N4903A provides calibrated jitter composition and automated jitter characterisation in a single box and is compliant with the latest serial bus standards.

The N4903A provides complete built-in and calibrated jitter composition for stressed eye testing of receivers. Automated and compliant jitter-tolerance testing covers all popular serial bus standards, such as PCI Express, SATA, Fibre Channel, FB-DIMM, CEI, Gigabit Ethernet and XFP.