Agilent Technologies announced the industry’s first fully integrated protocol viewing application for PCI Express 3.0. The software combines packet viewing and analog waveform annotation with advanced packet and symbol searching capabilities in a single oscilloscope-based tool. The software helps engineers identify protocol errors and simultaneously analyze analog waveform characteristics for developing PCI Express 3.0-based products address potential issues early in the design cycle and get their products to market faster. PCI Express is most commonly used in workstation, server and desktop computers supporting high-performance networking and graphics interfaces. The 8 GT/s operating speed of PCIe 3.0 devices causes significant signal integrity challenges for designers. Often, signal integrity problems occur intermittently, and they may present themselves as errors in protocol behavior. The N8816A PCI Express 3.0 protocol viewer software provides time-correlated views of physical and transaction layer errors. The software performs 128/130 bit decoding on PCI Express 3.0 traffic and displays serial packet data synchronized with the analog view of the PCI Express 3.0 waveform using only an oscilloscope. The decoded waveform is displayed directly on the analog waveform and in a list format with associated time and index information. This combination of simultaneous logical and analog views of PCI Express 3.0 data allows engineers to quickly isolate signal-integrity-related causes of intermittent protocol errors, reducing aggravation and saving time compared to doing the same task with a protocol-only tool. “We are pleased that companies such as Agilent are working to deploy tools that offer great visibility into the details of PCI Express 3.0 link training and bi-directional packet viewing,” said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG president and chairman. “These tools will help SIG members test their PCI Express 3.0 products early in the design cycle, helping to ensure that the products they introduce have excellent interoperability and high quality.”
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