Tektronix test set for USB 3.0 specification

Tektronix has announced a test set for the USB 3.0 specification, which will enable customers to rapidly test their Superspeed USB designs.

It is estimated that initial Superspeed USB interface ICs and consumer products should appear in early 2010, with widespread adoption continuing throughout 2010.

The first Superspeed USB products will likely include data storage devices such as flash drives, external hard drives, digital music players, and digital cameras.

These will be followed by video products and, eventually data-acquisition systems that need the high data throughput.

Superspeed USB will join other high speed serial standards such as 8 Gb/s PCI-Express and SATA 6 Gb/s as one of the more demanding technologies, requiring advanced test and measurement instruments such as the Tektronix DPO/DSA70000 oscilloscope series and analysis software.

The Tektronix oscilloscopes can acquire signals up to 8 Gb/s, at or above the 5th harmonic, enabling greater margin and fidelity for demanding compliance and debug testing.

With the higher bit rate, Superspeed USB receivers will also need equalisation at the receiver because the signal eye will be closed after travelling through PCB traces, connectors, and cables.

This equalisation stress testing is facilitated by the Tektronix USB test solution including AWG7000B arbitrary waveform generators and DSA8200 sampling oscilloscopes.

Superspeed USB will adopt a new physical layer using two channels to separate data transmissions and acknowledgements to hit its higher speed targets.

In place of the polling and broadcast mechanisms used in USB 2.0, the USB 3.0 specification will employ a packet-routing technique and is architected so that devices can inform the host when they have data to send.

The new link will continue the support the priority and bandwidth reservation that USB 2.0 currently has for the transmission of time sensitive data.

In addition Superspeed USB supports a new feature called 'Streams' that may be used to enable native command queuing resulting in improved mass storage throughput.

Back to top