PCE Express™ Protocol Triggering and Decode for Infiniium 9000 Series Oscilloscopes

Easily debug and test designs that include PCI Express protocols using your Infiniium 9000 scope

PCI Express® interfaces are gaining in popularity outside of the computer industry. PCIe® buses can provide a content-rich point for debug and test. However, since PCIe protocols transfer bits serially, using a traditional oscil­loscope has limitations. Manually converting captured 1’s and 0’s to protocol can’t be done in real-time. In addition, traditional scope triggers are not sufficient for specifying protocol-level conditions. Keysight Technologies, Inc. provides an economical alternative for low-level PCIe debug.

Extend your scope capability with Keysight’s PCIe protocol triggering and decode application. This application makes it easy to non-intrusively debug and test designs that include 2.5 Gb/s PCIe gen 1 using your Infiniium 9000 scope. Need to debug training and power management problems? This applica­tion can show what is happening during training. Using x4, x8, or even x16 links? Use the application to look at any lane, one lane at a time.

• Set up your scope to show PCIe gen 1 protocol decode in less than 30 seconds.
• Get access to a rich set of integrated protocol-level triggers.
• Save time and eliminate errors by viewing packets at the protocol level.
• Use time-correlated views to quickly troubleshoot serial protocol problems back to their timing or signal integrity root cause.

PCI Express protocol triggering and searching

Get access to a rich set of integrated protocol level triggers. The application includes a suite of configurable protocol-level trigger conditions specific to PCIe. When serial triggering is selected, the application enables special real-time triggering hardware inside the scope.

Hardware-based triggering ensures that the scope never misses a trigger event when armed. This hardware takes signals acquired using either scope or digital channels and reconstructs protocol frames. It then inspects these protocol frames against specified protocol-level trigger conditions and triggers when the condition is met.

PCI Express protocol decode

Keysight’s multi-window protocol viewer includes correlation between the waveforms and the selected packet. The selected packet, highlighted blue row in the listing, is time-correlated with the blue line in the waveform display. Move the blue tracking marker in time through waveforms and the blue bar will automatically track in the packets window. Or, scroll through the packet viewer and highlight a specific packet. The time-correlation tracking marker will move to the associated point in the waveform.

PCI Express protocol decode

Easily trigger on and follow PCIe traffic. In this example the scope shows memory completion with data.