Quarch Technology PCIe4.0/SAS 4.0 Cable Tester

Quarch Technology Ltd. provides qualification for high-speed data cables

The PCIe/SAS Cable Tester is a lab tool to combat time-consuming issues caused by faulty and non-compliant cables.

Most lab managers have a large bin of expensive cables in an ‘unknown’ state, put to one side while debugging connection issues. The loss of time in trying to debug link issues is a greater cost.

SAS and PCIe cables come in a range of speed grades and have active EEPROMS in at the end of each cable, to communicate their capabilities to the host system. Research from the firm has shown that various cables on the market do not have their EEPROMS programmed according to the standard, which may cause compatibility problems:

The company offers a way to preemptively screen or debug single cables before use. In addition to EEPROM analysis, the tester performs link training, lane mapping, BERT (Bit Error Rate Tests) and synthetic eye diagram capture. Everything needed to be sure that the cable will work well in practice.

“We’ve seen cables with poor signal integrity, cables with lanes swapped over and cables that report invalid rated speeds; and that’s just in our own small test lab,” says Andy Norrie, director.

PCIe/SAS Cable tester front and rear

Supporting SAS and PCIe cables up to Gen4, the ‘Cable Tester’s features make it for:

• Quality and functionality checks on new cable batches.

• Isolating – or ruling out – connection issues.

• Generating reports that can be archived for quality control purposes.

With simple automatic testing and a range of features on its companion software, Cable Test Studio, the cable tester has become an indispensable lab tool.

PCIe 4.0 / SAS 4.0 Cable Tester is available, and can be evaluated before purchase.

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Video: Watch it in action