Hewlett-packard Company

Christopher B Cain

John E Siefers

Robert E McAuliffe

Elaine L May

Lynn A Schmidt

Disclosed is a system for testing serial communications electrical circuit boards which interfaces to a board being tested through a plurality of serial channels. The system contains a plurality of personality modules, each of which can interface directly to a channel. A personality module will perform level shifting, data encoding/decoding, line termination, and clock/framing extraction as needed for a particular serial protocol. The system also contains one or more reconfigurable bit processors which may be connected together in a building block fashion to perform low-level processing on serial data received from or sent to a personality module. One of a plurality of serial test sequencers receives or sends data from/to a reconfigurable bit processor; provides a user programmable means to control the application and reception of test patterns to and from a channel; and interfaces to the user through a system controller.

General purpose, reconfigurable system for processing serial bit streams

Disclosed is a system for testing serial communications electrical circuit boards which interfaces to a board being tested through a plurality of serial channels. The system contains a plurality of personality modules, each of which can interface directly to a channel. A personality module will perform level shifting, data encoding/decoding, line termination, and clock/framing extraction as needed for a particular serial protocol. The system also contains one or more reconfigurable bit processors which may be connected together in a building block fashion to perform low-level processing on serial data received from or sent to a personality module. One of a plurality of serial test sequencers receives or sends data from/to a reconfigurable bit processor; provides a user programmable apparatus to control the application and reception of test patterns to and from a channel; and interfaces to the user through a system controller.

Disclosed is a serial frame generator which generates serial data which conforms to a user-selected telecommunication protocol. The serial frame generator can be used with a circuit board tester to create test vectors for telecommunications circuits which require serial data input. The serial frame generator is user-adaptable so that serial frame data can be produced for essentially any kind of serial frame protocol.

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Longmont, CO, United States of America

Christopher B Cain