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Last week we saw a $300,000 oscilloscope. This week, we look at another one for $470,000. The skyโ€™s the limit when it comes budgeting for โ€˜scopes. But aside from the price, what other advantages are there of embedded instrumentation-based system marginality validation tools?
Back a few years ago, engineers used expensive high-end oscilloscopes to perform signal integrity validation (SIV) on their designs, and considered that adequate in determining the success of a design. But with todayโ€™s products, process and parameter variations occur that require system marginality validation (SMV) to be done by less expensive software-based tools, to determine if a design is ready for high volume production.
In previous blogs we covered the kind of defects that might exist on high-speed serial I/O and their associated impacts on system performance and stability. A similar analysis on DDR SDRAM yields some interesting findings.
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