P5576PSWA PCIe 6.0 Protocol Analyzer Traffic Analysis

The P5576PSWA PCIe 6.0 Protocol Analyzer Traffic Analysis Software combined with the P5570A Protocol Analyzer with its integrated, single add-in-card design, brings unparalleled test tools to the world of protocol traffic debugging for PCIe 6.0. The vast feature sets of the analyzer provide deep functionality for validation and debugging issues, while also providing improved data exchange between device and host. This not only completes all demands of PCIe 6.0 protocol testing in one simple and user-friendly interface but also reduces time and energy on rooting out and validating root causes.

LTSSM Overview

• Proper Link Training is critical to solid PCIe performance, and it is often the source of many issues.
• Physical differences in channels and products are manifested at the protocol layer via the LTSSM.
• The LTSSM Overview allows visual progression through the LTSSM and a decode of which state both the Upstream and Downstream ports are in at a given moment. The LTSSM Overview is a powerful tool for debugging one of the most difficult and complex aspects of PCIe protocol.

Lane View

• Lane view provides a view of exactly what data is appearing on which lane of the PCIe link.
• With a mouse over a particular lane shows what packet types individual bytes are associated with. Thus, in a single simple view, a comprehensive understanding of the protocol makeup is given.

Transaction Decode

• The Transaction Decode tab provides a detailed view of how individual packets are organized into a transaction. The initial packet operation, acknowledgement, and completion are condensed into a single line in the Transaction Decode view, which can easily be expanded to see each packet atomically. The transaction based view can be much more intuitive to look at than the chronological order of packets provided in the Packet view, and gives a deeper understanding of the protocol.

Powerful Triggering and Filtering

• The most difficult bugs to solve are intermittent with no obvious cause. Finding the root of these troublesome issues often involves setting up long capture times. But capturing lots of data is not helpful if it cannot effectively be analyzed. Scrolling through trace captures looking for specific issues that are obscured by retraining events and other protocol ‘storms’ is an ineffective use of time.
• Finely tuned triggering and filtering settings to be able to capture most interesting traffic. This avoids massive capture windows that scoop up unwanted data which slows down the analysis process both in porting the data to a PC for viewing as well as needlessly obscuring critical protocol events. The Keysight P5576A PCIe 6.0 Protocol Analyzer Traffic Analysis Software was designed with this use case in mind. As such, it provides both Simple and Advanced triggering modes. Simple triggers are provided that are quick to be applied and customized. Advanced Triggers can be configured to apply a chain of If/Then logic steps to the trigger. In this way specific protocol events can be captured easily, even if they occur only after a complex series of previous events that may span a long time period.
• To extend this capability even further filtering can be applied to ignore certain traffic events to extend the capture window without clogging up the capture log with unneeded data.