Digital channel card offers data rates up to 16Gbps

5th March 2014

Mick Elliott

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Advantest’s latest digital channel card is the Pin Scale Serial Link (PSSL) for at-speed characterisation and volume production of high-speed semiconductors. PSSL is capable of data rates up to 16 Gbps. It extends the speed and performance capabilities of Advantest’s previous Pin Scale cards to enable affordable, at-speed testing of high-end ICs.

Built on the V93000 Smart Scale’s universal pin architecture, PSSL can perform per-pin testing with high multi-site efficiency. Each pin on a PSSL card can run at its own data rate, offering granularity that is unprecedented in the ATE industry. This enables full test coverage by matching the exact clock speeds of all ports without sacrificing pin count or timing flexibility.

All resources operate independently and concurrently, which makes PSSL ideally suited for high-volume production. With these capabilities, the new card can test advanced ICs designed for infrastructure and network processing applications such as 10G/40G/100G Ethernet, PCI Express (PCIe) interface or proprietary 10G to 16G backplane SerDes technology, used throughout China’s LTE communications infrastructure.

In addition to handling industry-leading data-transfer rates up to 16 Gbps, PSSL supports a full suite of physical layer (PHY) testing methodologies such as pseudorandom bit stream (PRBS) stimulus and response, jitter injection and measurement capability, and AC and DC analysis to deliver comprehensive margin test coverage.