A Survey of High Speed Bus Technologies for Data Movement in ATE Systems

A number of commercial bus technologies have emerged for creating high bandwidth (>1 Gbytes/s) data links and switched fabrics. These bus technologies can be applied to create high-bandwidth ATE systems and are particularly important for virtual/synthetic instrumentation architectures in which large data pipes are required to move data to a host processor for real-time software analysis. This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of several of these technologies, including PCI Express, Advanced Switching, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Serial Rapid I/O, and Infiniband. Data on bandwidth and latency performance and features such as native processor interfaces are discussed for each technology.