SSC applied serial ATA signal generation and analysis by analog tester resources

Abstract

In order to clear regulations on electro-magnetic interference (EMI), the serial ATA (SATA) standard recommends spread spectrum clocking (SSC) to reduce the significant peak in the spectrum of system clocks. Although testing of high-speed serial interface primarily addressed using digital testers, a SSC applied waveform is not an easy task for digital resources to generate and analyze, while analog resources in mixed signal testers can easily take care of such signals. The purpose of this work is to establish methodologies to generate a SSC applied data stream by using an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) and to analyze the SSC frequency trend by using a waveform sampler. The AWG generates 750MHz clock, align primitives and pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS) stream with SSC. The sampler analyzes the clock and the align primitives reconstructing the SSC frequency trend.