Agilent Technologies has introduced the PTC II for PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0. The Agilent PTC II will enable device compliance with the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) specifications and industry deployment of PCIe by providing all the mandatory test cases. With a single mouse click, R&D engineers can run all tests and view detailed results through a HTML report. 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.

The Agilent PTC II card features will make PCIe affordable for broad industry usage as well as provide sufficient functionality for most protocol-oriented validation environments. The features include an electrical PCIe 2.0 implementation running at 5 Giga transfers per second (GT/s), 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.

For full exerciser and LTSSM mode, a convenient software upgrade will enable either a "Gen2Ready" exerciser at 2.5 GT/s or a full PCIe 2.0 exerciser at 5 GT/s. The exerciser enables error injection and analysis for the link layers and the transaction layers; it also allows configuration space emulation and power management capabilities.