N4917A Optical Receiver Stress Test Set - selected 2007 by the readers of Photonics Tech Briefs as Readers' Choice Product of the Year!

Optical receiver stress testing is one of the key challenges during the design and test phase of multi-gigabit transceivers and ROSAs. Many different flavors of data rates, distances, fibers have to be verified. Each requires a different test set up to create the so-called stressed eye defined in each standard. Engineers had to select, calibrate and operate the test equipment along with the filters and cables from different vendors. Correct interpretation of the standard requires in-depth insight of experienced engineers. All this led to hard-to-reproduce and hard-to-compare test results between test labs and between suppliers and vendors.

The Agilent N4917A is a complete optical receiver stress test set that provides repeatable and calibrated conformance and characterization testing of optical receivers. Design and test engineers can now accurately test receive optical sub assemblies (ROSAs) and transceiver modules operating up to 12.5 Gb/s.

The optical receiver stress test solution consists of:

• N4917A calibration and automation software and accessory kits for 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBase –LR, -ER and 10 G Fibre Channel testing
• 81490A reference transmitter for 1310 nm and 1550 nm single mode
• 81495A reference receiver 1260 nm to 1640 nm single mode
• 8164B lightwave measurement system mainframe with 81576A attenuator
• J-BERT N4903A high-performance serial BERT with integrated and calibrated jitter sources
• 86100C Infiniium DCA-J with optical/electrical module.

Features:

• Calibrated injection of optical modulation amplitude (OMA), extinction ratio (ER), and vertical eye closure penalty (VECP) for accurate test results
• Automated compliance and characterization tests for 10 Gb Ethernet and 10 G Fibre Channel
• Affordable solution with one reference transmitter for 1310 nm and 1550 nm single mode
• Complete electrical/optical offering with Agilent reference receiver for 1260 to 1640 nm, single mode
• Reproducible results with Agilent verified filters and accessories
• Data rates up to 12.5 Gb/s
• Automated testing provides BER versus OMA results screen