Teledyne LeCroy Announces Portable PCI Express® 3.0 Protocol Analyzer for Storage Test

Capture, Decode and Analyze PCIe®, NVMe, AHCI, SATA-Express, PCI, SOP, SCSI-Express, TCG and SRIOV

Santa Clara, CA, January 12, 2015 – Teledyne LeCroy, the worldwide leader in protocol test solutions, today announced its new portable Summit T34 Protocol Analyzer for testing PCI Express 3.0 products. This new protocol analyzer addresses the needs of PCI Express Storage Developers by providing a portable yet highly featured analysis solution that matches high end features offered on the Summit T3-16 and provides flexible but deep memory buffer capability for long data captures. A protocol analyzer is used to help driver and firmware developers understand serial data communication between devices and systems. The protocol analyzer acquires, records, decodes, analyzes and displays complex high-speed PCI Express IO streams, including NVMe, AHCI, SATA-Express, SOP, PCI, SCSI-Express, TCG and SRIOV.

Teledyne LeCroy entered the PCIe Storage market in March of 2010 when it announced its support for the NVM Express (NVMe) protocol. It has continued that PCIe storage analysis leadership by increasing its coverage to include ALL storage based protocols that operate over a PCI Express link. Summit T34 is the fifth Teledyne LeCroy analysis platform to support these PCIe storage protocols. The small chassis Summit T34 protocol analyzer (8.5" x 1.7" x 12.0") weighs only 3 lbs and supports PCIe data transmission rates up to 8 GT/s, data link widths up to x4, and up to 32 GB memory trace depth in a single compact unit configuration. When combined with a second Summit T34 these features can further expand data lane widths up to x8 and provide extreme data memory trace depths of 64 GB. The Summit T34 is licensable to accommodate the number of lanes, memory depth and speed configurations to match user requirements with available budgets, and all systems feature a 13 month warranty.

"Many storage developers are making the transition from their existing storage protocol solutions to PCI Express and need essential tools to help them with protocol test," said John Wiedemeier, Product Marketing Manager for PCI Express Protocol Analysis, Teledyne LeCroy. "The new portable Summit T34 PCI Express 3.0 protocol analyzer is ideally suited to address usage needs such as deep memory trace depth, storage related triggering, searching and filtering, spreadsheet views and decoding for all PCIe storage protocols from PCIe to the storage command layer."

The portable Summit T34 protocol analyzer is designed to support multiple PCIe storage protocols such as SATA Express, NVMe and SCSI Express. The new storage related capabilities and new protocol analysis views optimized for PCIe storage development are currently supported across the product line and make these tools valuable to understanding data transmission from the PCI Express protocol layer up to the command layer.

"Teledyne LeCroy has been providing a wide variety of complete analysis and test solutions for SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel, MIPI and Ethernet for the storage protocol development community over the last decade," said Joe Mendolia, Vice President of Marketing, Teledyne LeCroy. "The Summit T34 represents the culmination of our experience in traditional storage with our industry leading analysis tools in PCI Express. Users can expect a tool that is extremely portable yet highly featured for meeting the challenges facing the PCIe storage industry."

Teledyne LeCroy provides a wide variety of storage probing connectivity options, including interposers for M.2 and SFF-8639 single- and dual-port connectors, multi-lead solder-down tapping, mid-bus probing and standard PCIe slot connectors. In addition, many embedded board connector types such as XMC, VPX, AMC, XMC and Compact PCI Serial are also supported. Each interposer is designed for reliable data transmission between hosts and devices and for quick set up times for testing new hosts or new devices. The Teledyne LeCroy protocol analyzer uses built in auto calibration for complete capture of all data transmitted to each device under test(DUT). This time saving feature is an ideal alternative to other systems that need several hours of manipulating manual jumper settings while requiring expert knowledge in eye diagram measurements to get a "tuned" interposer.

The Summit T34 protocol analyzer includes the same powerful PETracer™ software included with Teledyne LeCroy's most advanced PCI Express protocol analysis systems. PETracer includes important data analysis views such as:

CATC View
Storage Spreadsheet View
LTSSM/Substate Views
Hierarchical Views
BitTracer™ Views
Data Views
Flow Control Views
Configuration Space Views
Expert storage triggering/searching/filtering

The application display is highly configurable and can be modified to fit most users debugging styles. A customizable multi-state trigger makes it easy to discover protocol issues on the bus. Features such as multiple local/global timers and counters allow the user advanced control to create sophisticated trigger sequences.

Features that are now in their third generation—such as BitTracer™, a raw mode recording capability that shows channel information like bit symbols, binary and 10-bit data—will help describe what is happening right at the PCIe electrical level. In addition, other features such as hierarchical displays, real-time statistics, protocol traffic summaries, detailed error reports, performance analysis, queue and flow control tracking, powerful test scripting and the ability to create user-defined test reports will allow developers to quickly troubleshoot intricate problems and finish their projects on time.

The Summit T34 also supports USB 2.0/3.0 and Ethernet 10/100/1000 LAN as standard features. By connecting over a LAN, engineers can operate the system remotely (e.g., control an analyzer operating in a remote lab). Also, engineers working collaboratively can time-share use of a single analyzer, reducing the need for multiple systems and increasing the cost effectiveness of the product. The Summit T34 also supports CrossSync, providing for time synchronized correlation between itself and all other Teledyne LeCroy supported protocols, including; DDR, Ethernet, FCoE, Fibre Channel, M-PCIe, SAS/SATA, SSIC, UFS, UniPro and USB.

Recently, Teledyne LeCroy has made available a free software utility called TeleScan™ PE which supports system scan, read, write, and register decoding features for the PCIe 3.0 specification. TeleScan PE is used by PCI Express developers to better understand how their computer systems are configured with PCI Express-based devices. The utility will support scanning on host machines using Microsoft Windows® 7 or Windows 8, and also on Linux systems.

Pricing and Availability

The Summit T34 is available now to order. For additional information, contact Teledyne LeCroy at 1-800-5LeCroy (1-800-553-2769) or visit Teledyne LeCroy's web site at teledynelecroy.com.

About Teledyne LeCroy

Teledyne LeCroy is a leading manufacturer of advanced test instruments that measure, analyze, and verify complex electronic signals. The Company offers high-performance oscilloscopes and protocol test solutions used by electronic design engineers in a wide range of application and end markets. Teledyne LeCroy is based in Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. For more information, visit Teledyne LeCroy’s website at teledynelecroy.com.

PCI-SIG, PCI Express and PCIe are trademarks or registered trademarks of PCI-SIG. Summit, PETracer, BitTracer and TeleScan are trademarks of Teledyne LeCroy