Keysight (Agilent) N4903B Bit Error Rate Tester

The Keysight N4903B Bit Error Rate Tester (BERT) is a high-performance serial BERT engineered for comprehensive testing of high-speed digital interfaces and serial I/O ports. It delivers integrated pattern generation, error detection, and jitter injection capabilities essential for R&D validation, chip characterization, and transceiver module stress testing across modern serial bus standards.

– Technical Specifications

Data Rates
• Pattern Generator and Error Detector: 150 Mb/s to 7 Gb/s, or up to 12.5 Gb/s
• Pattern Generator with Option D14: up to 14.2 Gb/s
• Extended operation to 28.4 Gb/s with 2:1 multiplexer and demultiplexer plus clock data recovery

Jitter Injection & Tolerance Testing
The N4903B features integrated and calibrated jitter sources covering Random Jitter (RJ), RJ-LF, RJ-HF, Periodic Jitter (PJ1, PJ2), Sinusoidal Jitter (SJ), Bounded Uncorrelated Jitter (BUJ), Intersymbol Interference (ISI), Sinusoidal Interference, and Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) profiles including triangular and arbitrary waveforms for SATA/SAS and USB3 characterization.
• PJ1 + PJ2 range: 0 to 2.0 UI (Option D14 enabled, data rates > 12.5 Gb/s)
• RJ range: 0 to 20 mUI rms (0 to 280 mUI pp)
• PJ modulation frequency: 1 kHz to 100 MHz (extended to 300 MHz)

Signal Performance
• Intrinsic jitter: 800 fs rms (4-9 ps pp typical with internal clock)
• Transition time: < 20 ps (20% to 80%), < 25 ps (10% to 90%)

Clock Data Recovery
Built-in CDR with tunable and compliant loop bandwidth up to 12 MHz enables testing of clockless data.

– Key Features

• Pattern sequencer with up to 120 blocks and counted loops
• Pattern capture and bit recovery mode for clock-less and non-deterministic patterns
• Second independent data output for crosstalk tests and 3-level signal emulation
• SER/FER analysis for jitter tolerance testing with retimed loopback
• Automated jitter tolerance measurement for fast total jitter quantification
• 128b/130b coded pattern analysis (Option A03)

– Typical Applications

Compliance testing for PCI Express, SATA/SAS, DisplayPort, USB SuperSpeed, Fibre Channel, QPI, HyperTransport, memory buses, backplanes, 10 GbE/XAUI, XFP/XFI, and SFP interfaces.