Kozio Offers Diagnostic Support for Custom PCI Express Boards
Kozio, Inc., the leading provider of advanced embedded functional test and diagnostics capabilities ideally suited for board bring-up, manufacturing test and power-on self test, announced full diagnostics support for custom boards using PCI Express. Kozio supports multiple PCI Express links and provides testing of all memories, buses and connected devices, including basic configuration testing, link protocol testing and transaction protocol testing, enabling a one-of-a-kind diagnostics solution for product developers in as little as two weeks.
“With this release, our suite of diagnostics products support testing the next generation of PCI Express peripherals, providing design engineers with a tool to fully validate their entire design at the earliest prototype stages,” stated Keith Short, Kozio’s director of technology.
As the speed of processors, buses and devices increase, product developers are finding that they need new solutions for testing high-speed devices. Older technologies such as emulation are not capable of providing the test coverage needed. Kozio delivers the hardware diagnostic software needed to support PCI Express, with extensible PCIe capabilities and PCIe test features, giving product developers a complete pre-verified diagnostics solution in just two weeks. The results are guaranteed to save development effort, board bring-up, and production testing time.
All Kozio products, including kDiagnostics(TM), kManufacturing(TM), kPOST(TM) and kField(TM), provide self-booting capabilities, including the ability to discover multiple PCI (PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express) buses and the automatic configuration of all devices discovered on those buses. Each discovered device is memory-mapped allowing full interaction with the device through the Kozio command line, menu or scripting faces. For known devices, Kozio provides a full test suite validating the complete data path to and from the bus-connected device.
Kozio’s diagnostics support software for custom boards using PCI Express is available now. Kozio’s kDiagnostics(TM) software is available for a free 30-day evaluation on Advanced Micro Circuits Corporation’s PowerPC 440SPE Yucca platform. Please see the full evaluation list on Kozio’s website.
Kozio provides a turnkey image that can be programmed and requires no bootloader, OS or application software. With the full diagnostic package, a full-board test report is available within minutes of running Kozio’s pre-verified software.
About PCI Express Technology
PCI Express technology is the new industry standard. Approved on April 17, 2002, it is an evolutionary upgrade to the existing PCI bus. It co-exists with the PCI bus, but PCI Express is a point-to-point connection that carries data in packets. PCI Express does not share bandwidth, but communicates directly with devices via a switch that directs data flow. It allows for hot swapping or hot plugging and consumes less power than standard PCI. The most promising feature is that PCI Express is scalable. Lanes can be added to achieve greater bandwidth, which will extend its capabilities as technology advances.
Benefits of Using Kozio Products – Regression Testing
The advanced scripting capabilities in Kozio kDiagnostics provides an ideal solution for running regression/burn-in testing on early prototype boards. As an example, a Kozio customer can run kDiagnostics on two identical boards and connect them through a PCI bus. In a few minutes, one can create a custom script that will transfer data packets for one board to the other and validate the received data, using direct memory access (DMA) capabilities when provided by the processor. This provides two simultaneous streams of data across the PCI bus moving from one board to the other that can be run for hours or days.
About Kozio, Inc.
Kozio, Inc. is the leader in embedded test solutions for today’s electronic products. Kozio delivers turnkey software that provides a comprehensive suite of hardware diagnostics used for debugging and testing custom boards implementing processors from AMCC, ARM, IBM, Intel, Freescale, TI or MIPS. Kozio’s clients build state-of-the-art products where successful use of the newest technologies with shortened development cycles requires them to constantly innovate to stay ahead of their competition. Kozio software improves test methodologies and streamlines the development process with proven solutions for board bring-up diagnostics, manufacturing test, environmental test, power-on self-test, in-field diagnostics and returns testing. By delivering thorough software diagnostics ahead of the hardware, Kozio reduces project schedule risk and development costs while increasing test coverage. Headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, Kozio products are available through a direct sales force and worldwide distributors.
Kozio, kDiagnostics, kManufacturing, kPOST, kField, I/O Engine and Flash-N-Run are registered trademarks of Kozio, Inc. AMCC is a registered trademark of Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. PowerPC is a registered trademark of the International Business Machines Corporation.
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