Analyser is dedicated to PCI Express development

Designed for debugging, testing and validating the PCI Express protocol, the Vanguard Express analyser allows testing of x1, x4 and x8 PCI Express card-edge and XMC form factors.

Vmetro has expanded its highly successful Vanguard analyser family with the introduction of the Vanguard Express PCI Express protocol analyser.

Designed for debugging, testing and validating the PCI Express protocol, the Vanguard Express analyser allows testing of x1, x4 and x8 PCI Express card-edge and XMC form factors.

The Vanguard Express is the only PCI Express analyser offered for the XMC form factor.

XMC is the PCI Express Mezzanine Card defined in the VITA 42.3 specification.

The Vanguard Express incorporates 20 years of Vmetro bus analyser expertise.

"The Vanguard Express product range greatly increases productivity for engineers, by allowing the same captured data to be viewed both with and without protocol details", says Stein Erik Maurice, Product Manager at Vmetro.

"Vmetro's unique data view is the result of listening to customers involved in software development and system integration".

The Vanguard Express is designed to offer maximum flexibility for multiple form factors.

In an XMC environment, a device under test is installed on top of the Vanguard Express analyser.

In the PCI Express card-edge form factor, the Vanguard Express installs between the system slot and the device under test.

These approaches allow the PCI Express device under test to function normally, while having access to the PCI Express links.

This highly flexible design will be able to provide PCI Express analysis in other forms as well.

The Vanguard Express is operated via USB or Ethernet while using Vmetro's BusView 5 graphical user interface software running under Windows 2000 and XP.

A single workstation can control multiple Vanguard analysers for monitoring different protocols, like PCI-X/PCI, PMC, CompactPCI or VME.

The Vanguard Express supports advanced decoding of the PCI Express protocol.

This decoding includes viewing the trace data in lane, packet and data views.

Thus making the captured data easy to read and interpret for all users, regardless of expertise and task.

Real time performance analysis is also included with the Vanguard Express analyser.

The Vanguard Express predefined statistics include link utilisation, PLP distribution, TLP distribution, DLLP distribution and link transfer rate.

In addition, postprocessing statistics are gathered using the trace count feature on any acquired trace.

Error detection is performed by the Vanguard Express's onboard protocol checker.

Each error includes online help to assist with debugging.

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