Tektronix Adds New Comprehensive High-Speed Serial Protocol Test Platform

01/16/2012

Tektronix, Inc., a leading supplier of test, measurement, and monitoring products and solutions, introduced a new comprehensive protocol test platform that allows engineers to analyze, stimulate, stress and characterize high-speed serial links - with support for speeds up to 10Gb/s. With the new TPI4000 http://www.tek.com/protocol-analyzer/tpi4000, customers can use one instrument to perform multiple test functions and to look at a variety of protocols such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI), and Serial Front Panel Data Port (FPDP).

With the broad acceptance of high-speed serial interfaces engineers are looking to complement their Tektronix oscilloscopes with protocol analyzers that can provide insight into the information that is being transferred across the physical layer. Engineers working with these high-speed serial protocols need to perform a number of tests, including interoperability and compatibility testing, performance optimization and stress testing. The TPI4000 Series provides a single instrument that can be configured to perform each of these tasks and more.

“The TPI4000 is the ideal protocol analysis tool for the realities of today’s world where every instrument needs to be broadly capable and flexible,” said Dave Farrell, Director, Digital Analysis Product Line, Tektronix. “A single instrument that can be configured to support a variety of functions and protocols saves our customers time and money because they don’t need to buy separate boxes for each test function or protocol or learn to use separate instruments.”

One Instrument – Multiple Functions, Multiple Protocols

The TPI4000 Series consists of two models. The TPI4202 is a portable unit with a built-in monitor and keyboard and supports up to 8 ports. The TPI4208 is a 4U rack-mount unit that supports up to 32 ports. Each model is highly configurable with options to support different data rates, to support different protocols, and to support different applications.

Key product features include:

• One Instrument – Multiple Functions: In a single hardware platform, the TPI4000 can be configured by the user to be any combination of protocol analyzer, traffic generator, system stress tester, or BER (bit error rate) tester. This eliminates the need to buy separate test tools for each of these functions.
• One Instrument – Multiple Protocols: The TPI4000 can support any combination of protocols simultaneously and can be reconfigured by the user to support different protocols. Multiple protocol support allows user to troubleshoot system-level problems while the ability to reconfigure the TPI4000 to support different protocols reduces total test cost.
• Database-Driven Protocol Analysis: The TPI4000 is the only protocol analyzer on the market built with a user-editable database that allows customers to define custom protocols using the optional Protocol Editor tool. This makes the TPI4000 ideal for applications such as defense electronics that add proprietary and confidential extensions to existing protocols.

High-speed serial protocols supported by the TPI4000 Series include Fibre Channel (FICON, AS1760, ASM, FC-AE-1553, others), Ethernet (iSCSI, FCoE, TCP/IP, IPv6, iFCP, AFDX, ARINC664, TTE, others), Serial Front Panel Data Port (Serial FPDP), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Serial ATA (SATA), Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) and Serial RapidIO (SRIO).

Availability

The TPI4202 portable unit is available now and the TPI4208 4U rack-mount unit will be available starting in the second half of 2012.

Tektronix, Inc. - www.tek.com.

Company profile:  Tektronix