PAM-4 Measurement SDK and Resource Arbiter

Optimization of throughput for transceiver production testing

Introduction

Optimizing throughput for transceiver production test and realizing close to 100% asset utilization of your digital communication analyzers (DCA demands new approaches.

Achieve high throughput and utilize your hardware to the fullest by acquiring and processing waveforms simultaneously, not sequentially. Disaggregate waveform acquisition and analysis onto different physical or virtual machines to optimize measurement flow. Run multiple intensive analysis tasks in parallel through an analysis server and effortlessly scale these to use hardware at close to 100%. Realize PAM-4 measurements with the SDK on multiple physical or virtual machines.

Further optimize the automated workflow for maximum throughput using the Keysight Resource Arbiter for optimizing resource usage.

A typical software configuration includes several N1094BS1A SDK licenses, the KS8108A Resource Arbiter Server license, one or more KS8109A Resource Arbiter Client licenses together with KS8000A or KS8400A Pathwave Test Automation licenses, and optionally the plugins for instruments and other resources.

Overview

Realize automated test scripts that disaggregate signal acquisition and PAM-4 analysis compute tasks onto different physical or virtual machines. Achieve optimum measurement throughput by running compute intensive analysis tasks in parallel on multiple physical or virtual machines.

This Software Development Kit (SDK) realizes the following PAM-4 measurements on waveforms captured with a Keysight Digital Communication Analyzer (N1092x DCA-M or N1000A DCA-X) oscilloscope:

• TDECQ

• Outer OMA and OER

• Eye Width

• Eye Linearity

• Eye Skew

Benefits of Disaggregation

Traditional approach

In traditional test setups signal acquisition and signal analysis are performed on the same physical hardware. Because resources are limited the acquisition and the analysis processes need to perform sequentially.

This approach limits measurement hardware utilization and throughput: Before next signal acquisition can take place, the signal analysis must finish. Depending on the complexity of the analysis task and processor speed the computation might take much longer than the acquisition time. This slows down the overall throughput and the measurement and acquisition hardware stays idle during the analysis.

Disaggregation approach distributing & parallel analysis on virtual machines

In the new approach with disaggregating the acquisition and analysis onto separate physical or virtual machines it is possible to offload the analysis task to one or several analysis engines.

Thus, a next acquisition can be started immediately after the raw signal has been upload to the analysis engines. If the analysis of one waveform takes longer than the acquisition of the waveform then several analysis processes can operate in parallel and take over a waveform as soon as acquisition is finished. The administration is supported by a resource manager like the KS8108A. Scale the number of analysis processes by adding multiple licenses of the N1094BS1A SDK.

Pathwave Test Automation and Resource Arbiter KS8400A Pathwave Test Automation Platform

Verification of devices, especially production, usually involves a set of test procedures using multiple instruments. To achieve high throughput and minimize cost of test it is necessary to optimize the workflow in multi-DUT test environment and make best use of the instruments and other resources by performing procedure steps in parallel and sharing instruments when testing multiple devices. But designing an optimum automated workflow for this is complicated. The Keysight Pathwave Test Automation Platform (TAP) and the Resource Arbiter support this for optimizing resource usage.