Serial oscilloscope gets the bugs out

LeCroy has recently introduced its SDA 7 Zi oscilloscope with SDA II, and instrument designed to advance compliance testing with the introduction of five new debugging methodologies that:

1) Visually predict bit error rate directly on the eye;

2) Provide dual methods of decomposing jitter that are presented both numerically and with insightful displays;

3) Provide Quick-View, for an intuitive eye and jitter breakdown master display;

4) Measure millions of unit intervals at speeds up to 50 times faster than any other oscilloscope; and

5) Integrate both compliance testing and SDA II debugging tools for complete drill down to find the source of the failure

SDA II includes IsoBER, an analysis tool that extrapolates the eye diagram data and displays the lines of Bit Error Rate directly on the eye. This helps to quickly determine the minimum eye opening and also is instrumental in detecting cross-talk by analyzing the vertical eye closure. These measurements are not possible with standard eye diagram techniques, such as Mask testing, because those techniques lack quantitative analysis of vertical noise and jitter.

The oscilloscope also uses LeCroy’s X-Stream II architecture, which is fast enough to allow the results of two decomposition algorithms for jitter analysis to be calculated simultaneously for the first time. Both the traditional spectral and the NQ-Scale decomposition algorithms are used to account for situations where cross talk or other types of deterministic jitter can masquerade as random jitter and cause incorrect calculations. The jitter decomposition calculates both methods simultaneously and alerts the user with a color-coded warning system only when there is a deviation between the results. This ensures that the correct jitter values will always be displayed and users can be confident in their jitter results.

For more about the SDA 7 Zi, visit http://www.lecroy.com

SOURCE: LeCroy Corp.

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