LeCroy Corporation has announced an upgrade to what is said to be the industry's only 6-Gb/s traffic-generation emulators for SAS and SATA protocols. Designed to run on the LeCroy STX-460 platform, the emulators enable generating valid and invalid traffic at data rates up to 6 Gb/s. The new enhancements add capability to support connection multiplexing for both hosts and devices — as well as for the new SMP commands and emulating two hosts, or two drives, simultaneously.

"One of the most significant and complex new additions to the SAS specification is connection multiplexing," said Matthew Hallberg, storage protocol specialist for LeCroy's Protocol Solutions Group. "Emulation systems that can generate traffic supporting this new capability are crucial to SAS product developers, enabling them to test and debug this functionality in their products."

The STX-460 platform from LeCroy is said to be the only test system capable of emulating connection multiplexing from either the host or device side, enabling storage-system designers to accelerate their product development cycle ahead of industry-wide adoption.

With the new 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 both traffic generated by the STX and returned traffic from the device under test — is captured and displayed in an intuitive trace format. Looping, iteration and a wealth of conditional statements provide for precise control of the emulator scripting routines.

LeCroy Corporation manufactures high-performance oscilloscopes, serial data analyzers, and global communications protocol test solutions used by design engineers in the computer and semiconductor, data storage device, military and aerospace markets.