At Keysight Technologies, the push for bigger, better, and faster solutions is constant. The engineers at Keysight Laboratories, the company’s central applied research lab, focus on moving test and measurement technology forward, often in cooperation with Keysight’s vendors. Usually these developments happen in steps. Recently, a leap was required.

In 2016, Keysight Labs saw that the data transfer speeds in Keysight’s test and measurement solutions were reaching a limit. Tests needed to support higher frequencies and provide better fidelity, leading to larger data streams at higher speeds. At the time, Gen 3 PXIe technology could move data at a theoretical maximum speed of 8 GB/s (64 Gb/s), and while the PXIe consortiums have defined faster standards, the limit in practice is still lower. It’s a technical problem that hasn’t yet been solved. A different solution was needed.