Electrical 800G Bit Error Rate Tester

BA-4000 Bit Analyzer - Electrical 800G Bit Error Rate Tester

Electrical BER tester supporting NRZ and PAM4 coding, with advanced FEC tools and with testing capabilities up to 800G.

Key features

100G (4x28GBd), 400G (4x56GBd) & 800G (8x56GBd)

Supports NRZ and PAM4

Supports PRBS 7/9/11/13/15/23/31/13Q/31Q, SSPRQ

FEC capability: RS-FEC Scrambled Idle Pattern for testing 53 GBd host side interfaces

Channel simulator

Burst/random error injection

Supports linear/gray mapping

O-SMPM connection

Reflection cancellation and noise cancellation (RCNC) for LPO testing

Applications

Test and validation of transceivers and cables

Test of optical components and PIC

Test of high-speed electrical IC

Description

Bit error rate (BER) is a key performance attribute for digital communications. The signal transmission quality of a network, subsystem or component, can be evaluated using a BER tester, which compares the data stream received to the transmitted sequence and computes the number of errors.

The BA-4000 Bit Analyzer is an electrical NRZ/PAM4 BER tester designed for the production floor. It comes in six models:

BA-4000-4-28-NRZ: 100G BERT including 4-channel NRZ 28 Gbit/s.
BA-4000-8-28-NRZ: 200G BERT including 8-channel NRZ 28 Gbit/s.
BA-4000-4-28-PAM: 100G/200G BERT enabling either 4-channel NRZ 28 Gbit/s or 4-channel PAM4 28 GBd.
BA-4000-4-56-PAM: 200G/400G BERT enabling either 4-channel NRZ 56 Gbit/s or 4-channel PAM4 56 GBd.
BA-4000-8-28-PAM: 200G/400G BERT suitable for either 8-channel NRZ 28 Gbit/s or 8-channel PAM4 28 GBd.
BA-4000-8-56-PAM: 400G/800G BERT suitable for either 8-channel NRZ 56 Gbit/s or 8-channel PAM4 56 GBd.

The BA-4000 Bit Analyzer leverages FEC simulation capabilities to provide powerful analysis for burst error. Some of the main FEC features are:

PRBS error check and correction
Pre-FEC and Post-FEC BER
KP4/KR4 and low latency FEC protocols
FEC Generator and Checker (FGC) to address RS-FEC Scrambled Idle Pattern
FEC symbol error distribution plot: codewords vs symbols errors
FEC margin auto-calculation

Complete suite of bit analyzers for R&D and manufacturing up to 800G

The BA-4000 is a world-class series of 100G/800G electrical bit-error-rate (BER) testers. It is designed for the production line, quality control and R&D use from components to transceivers and cables.

The BA-4000-RCNC model has been specifically designed to enable the testing of linear-drive pluggable optics (LPO), a technology addressing the need of high bandwidth and low power interconnects required by AI/ML applications. The strong correlation between the BA-4000-RCNC test results and real switch performance reduces uncertainty, allowing manufacturers to qualify transceivers with confidence and efficiency.

Multiple use cases from R&D to validation and manufacturing

IC vendors/manufacturers

Excellent signal quality

Transceivers and cable manufacturers

Powerful equalizer and channel simulator designed for LPO testing

With LPO transceivers, no DSP is present to precondition or equalize the electrical signal, as is done in retimed optics. Therefore, any change in signal integrity on the host side is reflected onto the optical side and the more times the signal is handed off, the more potential for introduction of bit errors. Traditional transceiver testing techniques can’t pick up this signal degradation so new, more powerful testing techniques are required. The BA-4000-RCNC detects the presence of reflection, intersymbol interference (ISI) and FEC tail instability which are key performance indicators, capturing the presence of errors.