Agilent VP highlights strategy for high-speed digital design

Santa Clara, CA. Agilent Technologies is highlighting a variety of tools for high-speed digital design at DesignCon this week, as outlined in our complete coverage of the show. Jay Alexander, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Oscilloscope Products Division, described some key issues that are driving Agilent's innovations in the digital design space, all with the goal of helping customers accelerate design, simulation, analysis, and debugging to achieve compliant designs.

High-speed digital markets, Alexander said, are driven by some key megatrends: the rise of Asia and developing nations, who no longer satisfied with manufacturing alone are taking on design as well; the increasing dominance of mobile and cloud computing in the IT industry; and the need for energy efficiency. With regard to this last point, he said he avoids the term “green” and the associated hype—energy efficiency is driven by many reasons, including the need for long battery life in mobile applications.

Innovations in the digital design space, he said, center on faster processors operating on lower power, higher performance internal buses, and advanced memory components. Voltage levels, he said, can be so low that it's very difficult to make a measurement that doesn't affect the signal of interest, and in any event designers cannot gain access through a front-side bus.

Test equipment, Alexander said, must evolve to meet the needs of designers who are combining bus technologies (with PCIe over SATA implementations, for example), and simulation and modeling tools must evolve to support 3D stacking and through-silicon vias (TSVs). Agilent, he said, offers a range of products that support design and simulation, analysis and debug, and compliance test.

In addition, Alexander said, “Agilent's solution set for digital test is a combination of instrumentation and broad expertise built on our ongoing involvement with industry experts.” Agilent experts, he said, are active participants in a variety of standards organizations, including JEDEC, PCI-SIG, VESA, the PISMO (Platform Independent Storage MOdule) Advisory Council, the MIPI Alliance, HDMI, USB, and the Serial ATA International Organization. Agilent, Alexander said, is well positioned to help these organizations think through the measurement science of how engineers can verify that their designs comply with relevant standards and specifications.

Alexander summarized key offerings for engineers developing high-speed digital designs:

ADS with EMPro and SystemVue offers an integrated design flow with “measurement-hardened” technologies.
The Physical Layer Test System (PLTS) 2013 supports advanced signal-integrity analysis for high-speed interconnect (cables, PCBs, connectors, and backplanes), and it supports de-embedding, or automatic fixture removal (AFR), for non-50-Ω fixtures.
The N4960A Serial BERT and 86100D Infiniium DCA-X wide-bandwidth oscilloscope mainframe support serial-BERT applications to 32 Gb/s and are expandable for multilane 100-Gb/s applications.
The 9000 H-Series oscilloscopes and N2820A current probes offer precision signal viewing with up to 16X more resolution and 3X less noise than traditional 8-bit oscilloscopes and are suitable for testing battery-powered devices.
The InfiniiVision 4000-X Series oscilloscopes can acquire 1,000,000 waveforms per second and support USB 2.0 signal quality tests.
The M8190A AWG and N5990A test-automation software support HDMI and MHL sink compliance tests.

See our complete coverage of test-and-measurement and simulation-and-modeling topics at DesignCon. Click here for more.