SEPTEMBER 7, 2006 -- The analysis of high-speed serial links became easier and less expensive at the Optical Internetworking Forum's (search OIF) third-quarter meeting in Vancouver, thanks to the debut of a major upgrade to StatEye, an open-source software package that is an integral part of the channel compliance methodology of the OIF's Common Electrical Interface Specification (CEI).
CEI defines specifications for serial signaling and channels in chip-to-chip and board-to-board applications up to 11 Gbits/sec. The StatEye upgrade enables it to handle cross talk effectively and adds a useful Graphical User Interface (GUI) and an XML (Extensible Markup Language) framework, say report OIF members.
"StatEye is significant because it allows simple and accurate S-parameter analysis of backplanes defined for CEI," explains David Stauffer of IBM and the OIF's Physical and Link Layer Working Group chair.
OIF members and guests attended a full-day workshop addressing StatEye capabilities and package features. The presentations can be viewed at: www.oiforum.com/public/meetingOIW073106stateye.html. A preliminary version of StatEye is available to OIF members; an approved version will be available to the public on the OIF website at a later date.
Those in attendance at the third-quarter meeting also saw a workshop on ASON/GMPLS test beds in North America and Asia. That workshop presentation is posted at www.oiformum.com/public/meetOIW073106testbeds.html.
"These workshops are important because they help transform our Implementation Agreements into interoperable products," notes Brian Holden of PMC-Sierra and the OIF's MA&E Co-Chair-PLL. "In particular, this was the Forum's first public presentation of the StatEye S-Parameter channel analysis software."
Elections start meeting
Elections also were held during the opening plenary session of the third-quarter meeting, allowing the elected chairs to run their respective sessions during the week. Evelyne Roch of Nortel Networks was elected to the role of Interoperability Working Group Co-Chair-Networking.
Re-elected Working Group (WG) positions include:
• Jim Hamstra, Flextronics, as Benchmarking WG Chair
• Alex Conta, Transwitch Corp, as Software WG Chair
• Karl Gass, Sandia National Laboratories, Physical Layer Users Group WG Chair
Also re-elected were:
• Jim Jones, Alcatel, re-elected as Technical Committee Chair
• Dave Brown, Lucent, re-elected as MA&E Co-Chair-Networking
• Brian Holden, PMC Sierra, re-elected as MA&E Co-Chair-PLL