Multi-Gigabit Automotive Ethernet Test Solutions Ensure Standard Compliance, Speed Development

This article appeared in Evaluation Engineering and has been published here with permission.

Keysight Technologies expanded its Advanced Automotive Ethernet software portfolio to help automotive industry engineers, designers, and manufacturers develop high-quality, high-performance products that improve safety in driving conditions and enable emerging advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Three software additions for 1G and multi-gigabit data rates enable Tier 1, OEM, chipset vendors, and other automotive suppliers to quickly validate and debug automotive Ethernet devices, ensuring faster time-to-market and achieving IEEE and OPEN Alliance compliance.

However, higher speeds can result in data loss, interference, and greater risk of missed or incorrect packets of information. To address this growing challenge, Keysight has developed an automotive Ethernet transmit and channel test software solution for IEEE 802.3ch 2.5/5/10 Gb/s to quickly test, debug, and easily characterize complex multi-gigabit automotive Ethernet designs.

Keysight's automotive Ethernet solutions provide the hardware, software, cables, and accessories needed for compliance testing. It is built on functional and multipurpose hardware—trusted and repeatable measurement results from Keysight's popular Infiniium UXR-Series Real-Time and MXR-Series Real-Time oscilloscope families, as well as Keysight's E5080B ENA vector network analyzer, PXI vector network analyzers, or Streamline Series USB vector network analyzers. These instruments perform design verification and validation beyond automotive Ethernet.

Keysight's new automotive Ethernet software offers the following key features and customer benefits:

• Greater confidence with a device that's compliant to any standards: six standards for Transmitter, two standards for Receiver, and six for Link segment.
• Includes all relevant hardware, software, and accessories in one model number, saving time and money with only one compliance application to buy and use.
• Creates a test plan and automatically sets up the instrumentation for each measurement, applying the limit lines.
• Automated reporting in a comprehensive HTML or PDF format with margin analysis.
• Automated setups ensure result repeatability and enable teams to run tests without becoming experts in the required procedures.
• Accurate and repeatable results with Keysight instrumentation and specific automotive Ethernet fixtures and adapter boards.
• Enables protocol decoding for 1000BASE-T1 PHYs that quickly troubleshoots automotive Ethernet protocol problems back to its timing or signal integrity root cause.

One example is that, before release, the solution has been successfully verified on Broadcom's BCM8989x, the industry's first automotive IEEE802.3ch multi-gigabit PHY device. In addition, MegaChips Corp. used the transmit compliance software to validate its design.