Teledyne LeCroy releases the industry's first real-time oscilloscope-based PAM4 signal analysis software

     Teledyne LeCroy releases the industry's first PAM4 signal analysis software for oscilloscopes. The new analysis suite, capable of measuring all three eye patterns, jitter, and noise of PAM4 signals, is needed by engineers designing the next generation of electrical and optical links to seek speed doubling by utilizing PAM4 signals.

     PAM4 encodes 2 bits of information for each Symbol by using a 4-level signal instead of the previous 1 bit. Compared to 2-level NRZ signals, the cost of doubling the amount of information is more expensive and more complex. The PAM4 eye map contains three eye maps instead of one, and includes 12 types of switches instead of two. Engineers must understand how their transmitters, channels, and links affect the quality of the PAM4 signal eye pattern, and evaluate the relationship between the eye pattern closure due to jitter and noise and the bit error rate (BER) function.

     Traditional serial data analysis tools in oscilloscopes are mainly designed for NRZ signals, so new tools and techniques need to be developed to test 4-level signals. The new PAM4 signal analysis tool is specifically designed for 4-level signals and for eye pattern, jitter, and noise measurements for all three eye patterns of PAM4 signals. The overall jitter and noise are decomposed into random and inherent components within a given jitter and noise behavior. In addition to verifying the jitter, noise, and eye height/eye width parameters, the software allows the user to understand the source of jitter by displaying a series of histograms, tracing, spectrum, and bathtub curves.

     The PAM4 analysis package is the latest innovation in Teledyne LeCroy's continuous history of innovation for jitter and timing measurements of complex signals. Teledyne LeCroy was the first to offer a dedicated jitter analysis and serial data analysis oscilloscope, and the current serial data analysis package SDAIII-CompleteLinQ is the third generation serial data analysis tool. The tool is the only analytical tool in the industry that provides simultaneous eye, jitter and noise measurements for easy comparison of four serial signals. The PAM4 Analysis package was developed based on these experiences and is dedicated to the test analysis of PAM4 signals.