Agilent Korea (CEO-President Yoon Duk-kwon) announced an AXIe-based MIPI M-PHY protocol analyzer for next-generation mobile computing applications. The new protocol analyzer helps engineers in R&D and manufacturing analyze MIPI M-PHY-based designs with greater insight.

"The M-PHY physical layer is a critical part of the design and manufacturing of next-generation mobile computing products such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops," said Joel Huloux, President of the MIPI Alliance. "The most important task of the MIPI Alliance is to bring excellent products to market by establishing and advancing standard specifications. We are very pleased that Agilent has launched a new analyzer for UniPro interface analysis."

In addition, Mian Quddus, President of the UFS Association, stated, “Mobile platform products applying UFS, the next-generation memory standard, are increasing,” and added, “By using tools that make mobile platform product verification more convenient, the product design process can be shortened with high reliability.”

Today's mobile computing designs are going beyond the traditional capabilities of PCs. Mobile product designers are adding multiple high-speed buses to their designs to manage multiple high-resolution cameras, high-speed peripherals, high-performance graphics adapters, and large memory buffers. Due to increasing bandwidth demands, M-PHY specifications are becoming more advanced, including options for four lanes and 6.0 Gbs. The U4431A provides up to 16 gigabytes of analysis memory per lane, enabling system traffic capture for tens of seconds even at high speeds.

In addition, Agilent’s U4431A provides a feature called “Raw Mode” that allows design engineers to view time-correlated 8-bit/10-bit data for each protocol. This displays information about how packets are formed within the physical layer in the form of waveforms or lists.

This design visibility extends to the M-PHY protocol stack, enabling error detection from the physical layer to the link, and from the transport layer to high-level application layers. This allows engineers to identify abnormal data throughout the entire transmission process.

Ross Nelson, General Manager of Agilent Digital Debug Solutions, said, “I have heard from industry-leading silicon manufacturers that they have the technological potential to put low-cost computing devices in the hands of everyone on Earth.” He added, “Features like Raw Mode will provide insights for analyzing designs in greater detail and help resolve discovered issues more quickly. Consequently, engineers will be able to spend more time on development and optimization.”

The Agilent U4431A provides powerful capabilities to isolate abnormal events that may occur within the bus. Real-time triggering enables the detection of errors at each layer of the protocol, while filtering functions allow for focused analysis of specific types of traffic. Traffic overviews and measurement markers enable designers to analyze traffic ranging from overall bursts to fine nano-super-resolution.

The U4431A, in the form of a modular AXIe blade, allows users to analyze multiple M-PHY buses simultaneously. M-PHY buses can be time-correlated with MIPI D-PHY CSI-2 and DSI-1 PCIe®, DDR, and HDMI buses, or even general high-speed logic analyzer modules. Another advantage is that design engineers can purchase the lanes, memory, and protocol support currently required and perform additional upgrades as needed.
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The launch of the new U4431A MIPI M-PHY analyzer, which supports FS and UniPro, marks Agilent's entry into the M-PHY protocol analysis market. In the second half of this year, new products focusing on SSIC (USB-3 over M-PHY), M-PCIe (PCIe over M-PHY), and CSI-3 are scheduled for release. With the launch of these new products, Agilent will introduce a more complete M-PHY solution that includes transceiver physical layer testing.