- Anritsu’s latest support offerings of FEC symbol capture function and PAM4 Bathtub test capability ensures stronger 5G mobile communications
- It helps in evaluating the performance of high-speed devices and shortens development time
The spread of commercial next-generation 5G mobile communications services has enabled faster sending and receiving of large video and data files. To support larger and faster transmissions, data centres, which are key infrastructure in 5G mobile networks, are also investigating speed upgrades from the current 100 GbE to 400 GbE and future 800 GbE/1.6 TbE standards.
 PAM4 used in 400 GbE gets easily affected by noise and transmission path losses, making it difficult to achieve error-free transmissions and requiring use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) to correct generated errors and maintain transmission quality.
Consequently, there is an increasing need for quantitative measurement of jitter-related signal quality, such as jitter tolerance measurement for evaluating the performance of high-speed devices and transceivers for 400-GbE.
Strengthened support
To meet this need and support 400G network evolution, Anritsu has strengthened the device development support for 400-GbE and 800-GbE transmissions by adding two new features to its Signal Quality Analyzer-R MP1900A series: the FEC symbol capture function to evaluate FEC-based network elements and the PAM4 Bathtub test capability.
In today’s high-speed networks, some low-probability errors occur in data traffic, which can be corrected using FEC. The new MP1900A ED functions analyse the types of errors to evaluate whether or not the errors can be corrected by FEC and starts capturing data streams when the burst errors exceed the FEC uncorrectable threshold. From the captured data, a user can determine and troubleshoot what kind of data stream caused the uncorrectable burst errors.
Since the impact of jitter becomes severe as the data-stream baud rate is increased to achieve a higher traffic capacity, the PAM4 Bathtub test capability can evaluate and quantify the jitter phase margin.
The modular MP1900A running embedded Windows 10 has good expandability. As well as supporting 400-GbE and 800-GbE PAM4, it is a market-leading bit error rate tester (BERT) for various high-speed interfaces, including PCI Express Gen5 and USB4, using a full line of modules and application software. In addition to more accurate BER measurements, the MP1900A helps shorten development times for high-speed devices and transceivers.
