ASSET supports Intel Xeon processors 5600/7500 series and Itanium 9300 processors with validation and test tools

ASSET’s ScanWorks platform capitalizes on Intel’s embedded instrumentation strategy, which centers on that company’s Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST) technology. Intel has been embedding IBIST into its leading processors and chip sets while ScanWorks has provided a comprehensive validation and test solution for Intel-based designs and their high-speed input/output (I/O) buses, including Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI), PCI Express (PCIe), Direct Memory Interface (DMI) and Double Data Rate memory, third generation (DDR3).

“As Intel increases the capabilities of the Xeon and Itanium processor families and pushes the outer edge of the performance envelope in the server, workstation and high-performance computing (HPC) market, tools to quickly validate and test new design platforms become increasingly critical,” said Tim Caffee, ASSET’s vice president of design validation. “It’s always a race for equipment manufacturers to get to market before the competition with servers based on new processors. Effective validation tools like ScanWorks are imperative to do this.”

The ScanWorks validation tools for high-speed I/O include functionality for bit error rate testing (BERT), margining tests, and pattern generation and checking. In validation applications, these tools verify that the serial I/O buses perform as expected before the design moves into high-volume manufacturing.

Intel’s new Xeon processors are based on that company’s next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, but each series targets a different strata of the server market. The 32-nanometer (nm) 5600 series supports data center servers, workstations and high-performance computing systems with one or two processors and offers a high level of security. The 7500 series scales upwards to servers with as many as 256 processors and includes new reliability features for mission-critical server applications.

The Itanium processors target the high-end server market and are currently running 80 percent of the mission-critical server applications at the largest 100 companies in the world. The new Itanium 9300 series (codenamed Tukwila) doubles the performance of this processor family by increasing the number of cores of previous Itanium processors from two to four. New scalability and reliability features have been incorporated for high-availability corporate IT applications.