Eye diagram analysis is vital to debugging high-speed interfaces and assessing data transmission quality.
While traditional methods still have significant value, they also have several weaknesses with less accurate or less detailed analysis of signal quality. "Live eye" with an edge trigger provides a first glance but cannot capture non-transitional bits. Continued bit streams with a software CDR requires much more data and time consuming postprocessing.
The new approach from Rohde & Schwarz utilizes a configurable hardware CDR for both a true "live eye" view of a signal, while also allowing for continued bit stream analysis by applying the timing information from the hardware CDR for the bit slicing, offering not only the fastest approach to high statistical confidence, but also a more in-depth analysis.