Challenges in High Speed Interface Testing

Abstract

There is a common trend towards the incorporation of Serial Interfaces into Systems-on-Chips (SoC), both for inter-chip and intra-chip high-bandwidth data transfers. Serial interfaces have the same channel medium drives as Parallel interfaces and provide increased data rates and fewer interconnects. High speed serial interfaces, such as SATA, Hyper- Transport, and PCI Express, are becoming pervasive in networking and in computer equipment. Some computer interfaces are converging to communications interfaces. Today, speeds for these serial interfaces range from 1.5 to 3.3 Gbps; in the near future, they will reach 6.4 Gbps and beyond (Figure 1).