Options for high-volume test of multi-Gb/s ports

Devices with multi-GB/s ports from a variety of suppliers are shipping in high-volume today. Common port standards such as PCI Express are proliferating along with specialty ports. The number of lanes in multi-GB/s port can usually be scaled to increase bandwidth. The use of this serial/parallel port technology is growing as its bandwidth scaling, PCB trace out. Traditional SERDES devices with only 1 or 2 lanes had most yield fallout in the high-speed serial portion of the design. The industry responded with ATE instruments to expose those defects. Physical layer compliance testing is always a challenge and becomes overwhelming when coupled with multiple port types. In many cases, logic test patterns are applied through a multi-GB/s port at speed. The very high speed interfaces shows non-deterministic logic behavior.