Agilent Technologies' 3 Gb/s BERT Provides Lowest Cost of Test for Electrical and Optical Device Manufacturing

Agilent Technologies Inc. today announced a low-cost 3 Gb/s BERT (Bit Error Ratio Tester) that enables transceiver manufacturing test at one-third the price of the existing N4906B BERT.

The new Agilent N5980A also has twice the maximum test throughput which, combined with the reduction in price, reduces the cost of test by a factor of six -- the lowest in the industry. In addition, the N5980A is six times smaller in size, which conserves valuable space, further lowering the cost of test and making it especially attractive for low-cost, high-throughput manufacturing test applications, such as gigabit transceiver manufacturing.

The new Agilent N5980A 3 Gb/s BERT offers the following benefits:

• Standard measurements at rates between 155 Mb/s and 3.125 Gb/s.
• Generation of Pseudo Random Bit Sequence (PRBS) polynomials and a K28.5 pattern at Low Voltage Differential Signal (LVDS) or Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) levels.
• Flexible connections to the device under test via 3.5 mm differential electrical coax connectors and/or standard optical SFP module plug-ins.
• Optical and electrical error injection (once or at selectable Bit-Error-Ratio).
• Analysis of gated Bit-Error-Ratio with display of the absolute number of errors and selectability of gate time.
• Dramatically simplified transceiver measurements that provide just the essential tests via the graphical user interface (running on an external Windows(r) XP PC via a USB 2.0 interface).
• Full programmability of all graphical user interface features from another software program, making automation in manufacturing an easy task.

"The low cost, high throughput, small size and ease-of-use of the N5980A BERT bring down the overall cost of test to a new minimum," said Siegfried Gross, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Digital Verification Solutions division. "The reduction in cost of test and size makes it the ideal test product for manufacturing."

U.S. Pricing and Availability

The Agilent N5980A BERT is expected to be available April 1, 2006, at a price of $20,000.

More information about the Agilent N5980A BERT is available at www.agilent.com/find/manufacturing_BERT . Photos of the product are available at www.agilent.com/find/manufacturing_bert_images .