The increased data rates of today’s high-speed Input/Output (I/O) buses make maintaining transmission channel signal quality all the more challenging. One reason for the challenge is the parasitic effects that result from bus interconnects. Over the past decade, data rates for electrical interconnects have experienced a dramatic increase—from 1 Gbps to 25 Gbps and beyond—to meet the ever increasing demand for more I/O bandwidth from modern networking applications and high-capacity storage.

Multi-tone testing has many benefits. While the multi-tone methodology was initially implemented to increase the speed of immunity testing, it has been found that this method also improves equipment efficiency, offers greater flexibility to truly test the equipment (EUT) under real world threat conditions, and can be fully compliant to standards.