LeCroy Adds Lower Cost USB 3.0 Analyzer

LeCroy Corporation introduced an USB 3.0 protocol analyzer designed to lower the cost of developing and testing new SuperSpeed USB devices.

Based on LeCroy’s Advisor T3 Standard Edition, the Basic model at $2,995 provides the same lossless data capture with full support for USB 3.0, 2.0 and 1.1 analysis.

Now that Intel is shipping USB 3.0 in their 7 Series Chipset, the Advisor T3 Basic is suited to meet the feature and budget requirements of the cost-conscience mainstream market as companies seek to develop new USB 3.0 products and add USB 3.0 performance to their existing products.

The addition of USB 3.0 within the Intel platform makes USB 3.0 a likely de facto standard, and provides peripheral device manufacturers a compelling incentive to develop SuperSpeed USB products. Capitalizing on this expanding market for USB 3.0 means additional interoperability and backward compatibility testing with existing USB devices. The Advisor T3 Basic will be an enabler for developers interested in accelerating their SuperSpeed USB product introductions.

The Advisor Basic model has the benefit of the CATC Trace view with its ease of use and understanding for USB protocol. The de facto standard for USB debug, this hierarchical display provides visibility and comprehensive decoding from the packet level up through the High Level Device Classes. Notably it features hardware-based event triggering that has proven to be an essential capability for validating SuperSpeed interoperability at the USB 3.0 data rates of up to 5 Gb/s.

The Advisor Basic model offers robing technology with true capture of SuperSpeed 10-bit symbols.

"While some competitive USB 3.0 analyzers rely on commercially-available PIPE-PHY silicon for their probe design, the Advisor series features a general-purpose deserializer probe with lossless recording of every bit sent between host and device," said Michael Romm, VP of product development at LeCroy’s Protocol Solutions Group. "The main limitation with using the PIPE interface for a USB 3.0 analyzer is that the native 10-bit symbols on the bus are not preserved and instead the data stream is reduced to 8-bit patterns before being captured by the analyzer. In the process, the original 10-bit patterns are lost, including information on 10-bit structures such as running disparity. Without the running disparity information, it becomes impossible to accurately recreate the 10-bit symbol, especially important when invalid 10-bit symbols are received."

Released in 2010, the Advisor T3 Standard Edition became a top selling USB 3.0 analyzer. The Standard Edition continues to be available at the new list price of $3,995 and now includes the ability to capture both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 links concurrently. This is important for developers tasked with testing host behaviors including hub configurations and proper SuperSpeed to high-speed fall-back operation.