Evaluation Engineering - 17

excellent fundamental performance, such
as sensitivity and bandwidth, but also a
highly integrated solution with functions
such as clock recovery and an equalizer
for correcting loss effects. To meet these
needs, Anritsu has developed the new ED
with built-in clock recovery and equalizer to implement a PAM4 BER measuring instrument with market-leading high
performance.
Asay, Keysight: This isn't different than
what you will see from a lot of the T&M

vendors, but today's HSD designers and
integrators are under severe pressure to
get products to market fast and to move
to faster and faster speeds. Faster speeds
mean shrinking design margins, putting further pressure on engineers. With
Keysight solutions, we focus our products
to help companies get their products to
market as fast as possible. Our solutions
offer superior signal integrity, so validation engineers are truly seeing their device performance as opposed to the noise
of the instruments. We strive to be first to

Testing high-speed analog I/O

While the accompanying article addresses high-speed digital
test, Digilent Inc. has been helping its customers meet
challenges related to the design and test of high-speed analog
interfaces and data-acquisition applications.

Digilent Eclypse Z7 top view showing Zmod connectors

"Many modern electronic systems, including RF,
instrumentation, imaging, and test devices require high-speed
and/or high-precision analog inputs," said Steve Johnson,
Digilent president. "These subsystems require a complex mix of
analog, digital, and power-supply circuitry"-design specialties
that he said are often difficult to find and therefore often slow
down the design process and raise the cost to develop and
prototype cutting-edge systems.
Continued Johnson, "Digilent's new Eclypse platform with
SYZYGY-compatible Zmod expansion modules and software
infrastructure drastically simplifies the challenge of adding
instrumentation-grade analog I/O to FPGA-based systems,
speeding the development and prototyping process."
Johnson said there's a lot that makes the company's new
Eclypse Z7, to begin shipping in January 2020, unique. "At first,

market with full automation of solutions,
so designers and validation engineers can
focus on their designs and automating
their test systems.
Smith, Pico Technology: Above 1 Gb/s,
"the channel is the problem," so engineers
need to understand, model, and verify
the characteristics of channel design on
high-speed systems. Signal-integrity issues become increasingly severe at high
speeds, so we're trying to address that
with affordable tools to verify signal-path

it looks to be an FPGA board, but it harnesses the new SYZYGY
I/O standard, as well as a unique software environment to help
connect software languages (C++, Python, etc.) to hardware,"
he said. "That means that you don't need to be a hardware
engineer to program it. The 500-MHz data rates
of the SYZYGY connectors allow for a concept
versatile enough to cover a range of highspeed instrumentation and test applications.
Since it's not a turn-key product, it will require
development effort," but it is suitable for
specialized applications and especially for OEMs
or integrators that have challenging applications
with budget and space constraints.
"Semiconductor companies are constantly
pushing the speed and bit-depth or precision
of their ADC and DAC devices, and also the
bandwidths needed to communicate with
those devices," Johnson continued. "FPGAs are a good match
to interface with these devices, providing both parallel and
high-speed transceiver interfaces and the specialized compute
resources often required for in-line signal processing and/
or control. Digilent's Eclypse platform allows semiconductor
companies to create Zmod modules with new silicon, allowing
customers to easily evaluate the latest devices without
designing the low-level interfaces and specialized power
supplies, but still giving them direct access to the converters for
ultimate flexibility."
When asked about current and expected trends in high-speed
analog test, Johnson said, "We expect to see higher precision
and higher speed converters along with lower power as
demand for more portable and mobile devices increases. We
also expect the trend for more RF communications, test, and
software-defined radio (SDR) to drive the integration of more
high-speed analog into new devices and to generate additional
test challenges."
JANUARY 2020 EVALUATIONENGINEERING.COM

17
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Evaluation Engineering

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