The Finisar Systems GTX Notebook System is an all-in-one portable, laptop-based analyzer, bit-error-rate tester, error injector, and generator for storage-area networks (see the figure). It's well suited for design and field service applications engineers, supporting Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and iSCSI protocols. It supports both 2.125- and 1.062-Gbit/s clock rates for Fibre Channel, and 2.50 Gbits/s for InfiniBand. The GTX Notebook captures link data and displays in both Fibre Channel and embedded-protocol formats.
Also available as a two-port GTX Notebook analyzer, it can capture data on both ports of a duplex link. The GTX Notebook System provides up to 2 Gbytes of full-speed capture memory, spanning 4 s on a fully loaded, 2-Gbit/s link, including the 48-bit time-stamp for each frame, repeating ordered set, or error. Real-time precapture filtering can extend capture time to minutes.
Agilent's new General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) lab application is an option for the 8960 Series 10 (E5515C) wireless communication test set. With it, R&D integration engineers working on functional verification of GPRS wireless appliance firmware and hardware can access a flexible, comprehensive, and easy-to-use one-box solution for validating a product's parametric and signaling design requirements.
The Agilent 8960 accommodates the requirements of GPRS. The platform's new E6701A software retains the measurement and call-processing capability of the E1964A GPRS mobile test application, which establishes a vital link between design and manufacturing.
The ability to use the same equipment in R&D and production enables a rapid and smooth transition from one phase in the product lifecycle to the next, as well as improved troubleshooting processes. The test set's protocol-logging capabilities facilitate testing and troubleshooting of new signaling features and data channels so that engineers can extract better information about their design.
Logic And Protocol Analysis Unite: Data Transit's Bus Doctor lets users perform both logic and protocol analysis. Recognizing that a dedicated protocol analyzer has drawbacks, the Bus Doctor overcomes such limitations through ancillary pods that customize the instrument. It thereby acquires a bus-specific personality for each particular bus application, such as ATA, USB, Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, PCMCIA/CardBus, InfiniBand, and Logic Analysis.
The hardware pods provide the physical connection to the bus and tell the analyzer which bus is under test without any configuration by the user. Software configures the pod hardware each time the analyzer is powered up.
Another unusual feature is a user-definable histogram. This is a summary of where specific events occurred throughout the trace. Users can define their own events of interest, then see them displayed in the histogram.
The Bus Doctor's buffer segmentation lets users divide the buffer into smaller pieces by any binary value from 1 to 256 to provide up to 256 different trace segments. Users can then choose one huge trace or multiple smaller traces.