Electronics Weekly
For use in the company’s MP1900A signal quality analyser, the functions can be downloaded from the MP1900A website.
“Data centres are investigating speed upgrades from 100Gbit Ethernet to 400Gbit Ethernet and in future to 800Gbit – 1.6Tbit Ethernet standards,” according to the company. “PAM4 used in 400Gbit Ethernet is easily affected by noise and transmission path losses, making it difficult to achieve the previous level of error-free transmissions and requiring use of forward error correction [FEC] to correct generated errors and maintain transmission quality. Consequently, there is increasing need for quantitative measurement of jitter-related signal quality.”
MP1900A error detection function determines if the errors can be corrected by FEC and starts capturing data streams only when the burst errors exceed the FEC uncorrectable threshold. From the captured data, a user can discover what kind of data steam caused the uncorrectable burst errors.
The PAM4 Bathtub test is there to evaluate and quantify the jitter phase margin – since the impact of jitter becomes severe as the data-stream baud rate is increased.
MP1900A series is an eight-slot modular bit error rate tester for physical layer measurements of high-speed network interfaces such as NRZ and PAM4, and PCI Express and USB bus interfaces.
