17 | Keysight | N5393D PCI Express® 3.0 (Gen3) Software for Infiniium Oscilloscopes - Data Sheet
Powerful Debugging Aids
If your device fails a test, you need to
determine how it failed. To use the PCI
Express electrical test software, you must
install Keysight’s high-speed serial data
analysis software, which provides you with
several powerful debugging tools. The
8b/10b decoding feature lets you identify
data-dependent errors that result in eye
mask violations caused by inter-symbol
interference (ISI). You can perform 8b/10b
decoding to capture and display serial
data synchronized with the analog view of
a serial data stream (For PCIe 1.x and 2.x).
Make sure your compliance pattern has
the proper disparity (K28.5-, D21.5,
K28.5+, D10.2)
Use the 10-bit code display to validate
your compliance pattern conforms to
the PCI Express standard
Figure 24. The 8b/10b decoded symbol information is shown below the appropriate portion of a PCI
Express signal using the E2688A software.
Using the E2688A Serial Data Analysis tool
you can test for illegal characters in your
compliance pattern. You can also use the
mask test feature to identify the specific
digital patterns that caused a specific
failure in the eye diagram when testing
under the 1.1 specification (using a first
order PLL).
For 2.0 testing you can use a first or
second order PLL for clock recovery and
apply a TIE brick wall filter (included with
the E2688A Series Data Analysis package)
to achieve a proper clock filtering.
Problems with early silicon still persist with new PCI
Express devices. Make sure yours isn’t one of them. SKP
characters are not allowed in the compliance pattern.
Figure 25. Check for illegal characters in the compliance pattern (such as SKP’s) using the E2688A
Serial Data Analysis tool.
KEYSIGHT [ Keysight Technologies ]
