New Instruments Enable Engineers to Test the Limits of USB 3.0/2.0 Systems

These combined capabilities allow engineers to push USB designs to their limits - and beyond - so they can validate and troubleshoot their designs more quickly and with higher confidence.

Agilent's recent purchase of the USB technology of SerialTek, LLC, enabled the company's rapid development of these products. The purchase included SerialTek's USB BusXpert and USB BusMod products and related technology. Privately held SerialTek is based in San Jose, Calif. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

SerialTek's cutting-edge technology provides Agilent an immediate, competitive entry into the USB protocol market, said Ross Nelson, general manager of Agilent's Digital Debug Solutions product line. By introducing the industry's highest-performance USB protocol analyzer and jammer, we are helping our customers continue to innovate in this important market. Our customers can expect to see a continuous series of enhancements over time, leveraging Agilent's existing core technology.

One of the challenges facing designers of today's USB devices and systems is the widely disparate time scales of various types of USB traffic. A single USB 3.0/2.0 link may contain concurrent traffic from a relatively slow device such as a keyboard or mouse and a high-speed bulk-storage transfer to a high-performance solid-state drive. This range of time scales, from milliseconds or seconds on the mouse down to sub-nanoseconds on the solid-state drive, makes it critical for engineers to have test instruments that offer a combination of deep trace memory and complex triggering.

The Agilent U4611A USB analyzer can be configured with trace buffers up to 9 GB, and the U4611B analyzer comes standard with 18-GB buffers. A comprehensive set of integrated trace views and intuitive navigation allows quick and efficient analysis, while the highest-performance host interfaces in the industry make it easy for users to save their ultra-deep traces.

The analyzers and jammer are equipped with state-of-the-art triggering capabilities, including four concurrent sequencers of 26 states each, multiway branching and looping, and 32 counters and timers. Deep trace buffers, industry-leading triggering capabilities and the ability to precisely inject errors into the system under test ensure engineers can fix the most complex, hard-to-find bugs.

The introduction of the U4611A/B analyzers and U4612A jammer fills out Agilent's comprehensive portfolio of USB products, giving Agilent the most complete debug and compliance portfolio for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.

As USB 3.0 technology adoption continues to accelerate, Agilent's industry-leading physical-layer test tools have helped customers get certified products to market faster, said Jim Choate, Agilent's USB program manager. With full protocol analysis capabilities and the ability to link into our existing test tools, the U4611 product line enables developers to quickly link system-wide events to specific USB physical-layer events.

The U4611A/B analyzers and U4612A jammer, along with Agilent's complete USB 3.0 test solution including transmitter and receiver test, will be featured at the Intel Developer's Conference (Booth 854), Sept. 13-15 in San Francisco, and at the USB-IF Workshop, Sept. 20-23in Taipei, Taiwan.