It is the first company to offer early CEM fixtures for pre-compliance testing. The collaboration between Tektronix and Anritsu enables receiver verification, complementing a leading transmitter and reference clock test suite.
PCI EXPRESS is viewed as the dominant high-speed serial computer bus and has been doubling bandwidth every three years and is exceeding that target with this aggressive introduction of the 5.0 Base Specification (128 GB/s).
This rapid pace of development is expected to continue as PCI-SIG, the standard-setting body for peripheral component I/O data transfers, has announced the PCI EXPRESS 6.0 specification (256 GB/s) which is to be delivered in 2021 and includes multi-level PAM4 signaling.
“As the first company to offer CEM testing fixtures for PCIe Gen5, we are proud to help our customers once again speed the pace of innovation, giving them a leg up on competition,” said Chris Witt, Tektronix vice president and general manager.
The server/storage industry is rapidly transitioning to PCI EXPRESS 5.0 due to new requirements imposed by 400G ethernet, cloud AI and modeling (co-processors), storage capacity, and NAND-based storage and this progression brings an entirely new problem set for test and measurement traditionally split into Base silicon level validation and CEM compliance testing with the PCI-SIG.
“Electronics designers today demand future-proofing to protect their innovations' longevity into tomorrow,” explained Takeshi Shima, vice president of Anritsu. “Providing a solution through Gen6 gives our customers a sense of our commitment to stay with them on the cutting edge of development.”
“As PCIe becomes faster and more complex with the emergence of the Gen5 standard, engineers are faced with new design challenges, shorter time-to-market windows, new standards specifications to understand and apply, and new compliance testing requirements,” said David Bouse, PCI EXPRESS systems engineer at Tektronix. “It is vital to have a comprehensive test equipment and software solution in place prior to workshop certification. Our PCIe 5.0 test and debug solution can easily guide the engineer through compliance testing and debug to ensure their design meets new standards with a high degree of confidence.”
The PCI EXPRESS 5.0 transceiver and reference clock solution from Tektronix was developed and continues to be aligned with the 5.0 Base specification, 5.0 CEM specification, and 5.0 test specifications.
