Mobile computing applications are demanding more of the underlying computer Internet infrastructure. To enable increases in Internet and server-farm performance, higher-speed connectivity among server systems is required.
Conventional communication techniques often relied upon NRZ (non-return-to-zero) encoding. Industry experts contend NRZ will not work in a 56-GBit/s environment.
One way to overcome this challenge is to change the modulation technique from NRZ to pulse amplitude modulation. This allows engineers to dramatically increase the amount of data they can send across high-speed digital communication links.
Several industry standards bodies are actively promoting PAM-4 technology to enable the next-generation speed class and push higher data rates for a given channel compared to traditional NRZ signalling.
While PAM-4 technology leverages some traditional NRZ measurement algorithms for PAM-4 signals, to fully analyse system performance, unique PAM-4 measurements and parameters are required.
N8827A/B PAM-4 analysis software offers measurements such as eye width, eye height and eye skw, level amplitude, level noise and level skew and amplitude level linearity
