Agilent Technologies Inc. has introduced the industry’s first software for decoding USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Inter-Chip (SSIC) and MIPI Camera Serial Interface 3 (CSI-3) protocols on oscilloscopes. The new protocol decoders provide design and validation engineers with a fast, easy way to validate and debug their SSIC and CSI-3 interfaces.
SSIC is used for point-to-point communication between chips using the USB 3.0 protocol. The SSIC standard was developed by the USB-IF standards body, leveraging the MIPI™ Alliance MIPI M-PHY electrical layer to transfer USB 3.0 protocol. It allows USB 3.0 intellectual property and designs to be adopted into mobile applications.
The CSI-3 standard is the next-generation camera interface, developed by the MIPI Alliance to increase performance throughput and enable a greater feature set than the current CSI-2 standard. It also has better power-per-bit efficiency than the previous specification. The CSI-3 interface runs on top of the MIPI UniPro protocol layer as well as the MIPI M-PHY electrical layer.
Agilent’s N8819A USB 3.0 SSIC and N8820A MIPI CSI-3 protocol decoders are designed to run on 90000A, 90000 X- and 90000 Q-Series oscilloscopes. They decode protocol packets for the SSIC v1.0 and MIPI CSI-3 v1.0 specifications, respectively. In addition to using the software for start-up debugging, R&D design and validation teams can use the software to snoop at traffic on the interfaces. They also provide accurate timing measurements associated with the protocols.
Engineers can use both protocol decoders on Infiniium 90000 Q-Series oscilloscopes, which deliver industry-leading, real-time bandwidth of up to 33 GHz on 4 channels, which makes them suitable for testing devices that use today’s MIPI M-PHY data rates of 5.8 Gbps and for devices with data rates up to 11.6 Gbps, which is the next projected speed increase. With bandwidth upgradability to 63 GHz and the lowest noise and jitter measurement floor performance, the oscilloscopes ensure superior measurement accuracy and protect the user’s investment when the next data-rate increase occurs.
Additional information is available at www.agilent.com/find/n8819a and www.agilent.com/find/n8820a.
