At this week’s PCI-SIG Developers Conference Europe 2007, Agilent Technologies Inc. unwrapped its protocol test card PTC II for PCI Express or PCIe 2.0 compliance test. By providing all the mandatory test cases, the PTC II will enable device compliance with the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) specifications and industry deployment of PCIe, stated Agilent.

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With a single mouse click, R&D engineers can run all tests and view detailed results through an HTML report, said the manufacturer. A simple software upgrade on the PTC II can take hardware to either the Compliance Assured Test Package, running more than 180 tests, or to a full exerciser, including Link Training and Status State Machine (LTSSM) tests. In essence, the PTC II fulfills the needs of debug, analysis, validation and compliance, according to the supplier.

Key features of the PTC II card include
.An electrical PCIe 2.0 implementation running at 5 giga transfers per second (GTps), capable of plugging into a host platform and connecting to any card of any link-width PCIe slot up to x16;
.The ability to control the card using software on an external host connected via USB; and
.A graphical user interface on the host that provides selectable validation tests executable by a single mouse click.

For complete product assurance, Agilent provides 180 additional tests through a simple software upgrade to the Compliance Assured Test Package. The Compliance Assured Test Package runs 94 transaction-layer tests, 31 link-layer tests, 57 configuration-space tests, and 1 electrical-layer test. The easy-to-read HTML report displays failed tests in red, warnings in yellow and tests that passed in green. The Compliance Assured Test Package ensures high-quality product releases and reduces test and debug time.

The E2969B PTC card for PCIe 2.0 is available now. Pricing starts at $8,900.