Catalyst Intros 6-Gbit/s Emulators

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Catalyst Enterprises, Inc., a leading manufacturer of advanced design verification and test tools for Serial ATA (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), USB 2.0, PCI Express and other high-performance communications technologies, introduces the industrys only 6Gb/s traffic generators for SAS and SATA protocols. These emulators, which are designed to run on the STX-460 platform from Catalyst, enable developers to generate valid and invalid traffic at 6Gb/s speeds.

“Since 6Gb/s SAS and SATA initiator and target products will not be commercially available for at least 18 months, emulators will be crucial to developers who need to validate their designs within a simulated data storage system,” said Mark Adams, Catalyst Product Manager for Data Storage Protocol Testers. “The STX-460 platform from Catalyst is the only test system that is capable of emulating either an initiator or a target on a 6Gb/s SAS or SATA link.”

With the STX emulators, high-level commands can be easily defined and sent to initiator or target devices through a series of convenient pull-down menus. All traffic on the bus, including traffic generated by the STX and returned traffic from the device under test, is captured and displayed in the intuitive Catalyst trace format. Looping, iteration, and a wealth of conditional statements provide for precise control of the emulator scripting routines.

The initiator emulator can be operated at the command, frame and primitive levels. The emulator automatically performs CRC generation, 8b/10b encoding, and data scrambling. Link layer protocol exchanges, handshaking, OOB sequencing, and retry conditions are handled automatically, but can also be manipulated to create various error scenarios. The device emulator can be configured to exhibit normal and abnormal behavior, allowing for error handling routines to be tested. Catalyst Enterprises