DenseChip

SerDes & High-Speed I/O · All levels

Validation & Debug

Compliance fixtures, BERT/eye scan, failure signature debug, and production screening for SerDes signoff.

Section goal

Compliance fixtures, BERT/eye scan, failure signature debug, and production screening for SerDes signoff.

This section trains how to reason from traffic behavior to SerDes mechanism, then close with owner accountability, reliability gates, and release-safe decisions.

How to study this section

  1. Start with each topic hub and draw the mechanism path.

  2. Use reports and debug pages to prove causality before tuning.

  3. Practice worked examples and interview drills with explicit evidence chains.

  4. Close each topic with checklist and silicon impact pages.

Topics

  1. compliance-test-fixtures/ - Compliance Test Fixtures and De-Embedding

  2. bert-and-eye-scan/ - BERT, Eye Scan, and Error Analysis

  3. failure-signature-debug/ - Failure Signature Debug and Triage

  4. production-screening/ - Production Screening and ATE Strategy

Related topics

SerDes deep dive

Compliance fixtures, BERT/eye scan, failure signature debug, and production screening for SerDes signoff.

Concept diagram

diagram
VALIDATION DEBUG
compliance-test-fixtures -> bert-and-eye-scan -> closure

Metric graph

diagram
MARGIN TREND
healthy ██████
failing ██

Reports and artifacts

  • eye margin log

  • BER/FEC counter sheet

  • coefficient dump

  • JTOL/compliance margin report

Mini case study

A corner board failed link training after package update; isolating lane skew and PI noise restored margin.

Debug branches

  • Classify failure: training, eye, jitter, deskew, or runtime drift

  • Capture coefficient and margin artifacts under fixed thermal tags

  • Correlate SI/PI measurements before retuning adaptation

Senior review question

Ask: which latency, bandwidth, and reliability evidence proves this SerDes topic is closed under real traffic?

Practice this lesson