LeCroy Introduces Lowest Cost USB 3.0 Analyser at $2995

The addition of USB 3.0 within the Intel platform makes USB 3.0 a likely de facto standard, and provides peripheral device manufacturers a compelling incentive to develop SuperSpeed USB products. Capitalising on this expanding market for USB 3.0 means additional interoperability and backward compatibility testing with existing USB devices. As LeCroy's value-priced analyser solution, the Advisor T3 Basic will be an important enabler for developers interested in accelerating their SuperSpeed USB product introductions.

The Advisor Basic model has the full benefit of the intuitive CATC Trace view with its ease of use and understanding for USB protocol. The de facto standard for USB debug, this unique hierarchical display provides easy visibility and comprehensive decoding from the packet level up through the High Level Device Classes. Notably, the Advisor Basic analyser features hardware-based event triggering that has proven to be an essential capability for validating SuperSpeed interoperability at the USB 3.0 data rates of up to 5 Gb/s.

The Advisor Basic model offers best-in-class probing technology with true capture of SuperSpeed 10-bit symbols. While some competitive USB 3.0 analysers rely on commercially-available PIPE-PHY silicon for their probe design, the Advisor series features a general-purpose deserialiser probe with loss-less recording of every bit sent between host and device, said Michael Romm, vice-president of product development at LeCroy's Protocol Solutions Group. 'The main limitation with using the PIPE interface for a USB 3.0 analyser is that the native 10-bit symbols on the bus are not preserved and instead the data stream is reduced to 8-bit patterns before being captured by the analyser. In the process, the original 10-bit patterns are lost, including information on 10-bit structures such as running disparity. Without the running disparity information, it becomes impossible to accurately recreate the 10-bit symbol, especially important when invalid 10-bit symbols are received.

Released in 2010, the Advisor T3 Standard Edition quickly became the industry's top selling USB 3.0 analyser. The Standard Edition continues to be available at the new list price of $3995 (US) and now includes the ability to capture both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 links concurrently. This is important for developers tasked with testing host behaviors including hub configurations and proper SuperSpeed to high-speed fall-back operation.