Tektronix (News - Alert) has announced a significant expansion of its BERTScope Bit Error Rate Tester Series to meet growing 100G testing requirements.

The BERTScope Bit Error Rate Tester Series provides a new approach to signal integrity measurements of serial data systems, according to company officials. The new BERTScope features the sub 300 femtoseconds intrinsic jitter noise floor, which provides accurate BER test and root-cause PHY layer analysis to the growing Tektronix’s portfolio of Optical Communications Test products. 

Company officials said the introduction of the new Tektronix BSA286C BERTScope makes Tektronix the first test equipment manufacturer to offer complete support for standards-compliant testing up to 28.6 Gb/s, including error detection, pattern generation and clock recovery.

The new Tektronix BSA286C provides a turnkey high-speed communications testing framework for design labs trying hard to keep up with 100G test requirements, according to Brian Reich, general manager for performance oscilloscopes at Tektronix.

The new offering is the “only solution that provides a deep level of debugging insight, allowing designers to understand why a particular device failed initial testing.”

Engineers can use the BSA286C for debugging applications, which company officials say they use to perform true jitter measurements on a variety of signals, including low probability events.

They also exercise the added ability to “accurately” decompose jitter into its random and deterministic components.

Additionally, the addition of the BSA286C BERTScope provides labs with comprehensive PHY test suite for 100G standards verification and debug. For 100G testing, PHY layer qualification at full data rate is crucial – especially as the field moves into more complex modulation formats, said Michael Hochberg, director of the OpSIS silicon photonic prototyping service and a faculty member at the University of Delaware and at National University of Singapore.

“One of the key challenges in this field is the complexity of test setup and creating a validation methodology; we've used BERTScopes in my lab and these systems are remarkably easy to use while providing very accurate BER and jitter measurement results,” Hochberg added.

Beaverton, Oregon-based Tektronix is a supplier of test equipment for engineers focused on electronic design, manufacturing and advanced technology development. Recently, the company announced the SPECMON Spectrum Analyzer, a fast and versatile solution for hunting down sources of RF interference in the field.

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