BER test time optimization

Abstract

In commerce, time to market (TTM) is defined as the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. There are no standards for measuring TTM and it varies from product to product. The product life cycle of PC's is 2-3 years whereas for mobile products its 1-2 years. Major part of product's life cycle time is taken by testing phase. Hence it becomes essential to reduce number of tests to very critical ones and also to reduce test time. For high speed serial interfaces one of the quality measures of digital transmission is bit error ratio (BER). BER is defined as the ratio of number of received bits in error to the total number of bits transmitted. BER testing for high speed serial interfaces requires long string of bits to be sent and hence requires very long test time, usually in minutes and hours. This test time finally translates to money and hence should be shortened. This paper explains how hypothesis definition and testing can reduce BER test time and cost cutting can be achieved. Further research goes in to verification phase of this test methodology with test lab exercise.