Products

	OST-RW

The De Facto Industry Standard

The OST-RW provides fast and accurate creation of different
real-world optical impairments for testing performance of 10 Gb/s devices.

The OST-RW tests components and systems for standards compliance to IEEE 802.3ae and INCITS 10GFC Stressed Receiver Sensitivity requirements – the key to end-user plug & play performance.   The OST-RW tests systems, line cards, and components including XFP, X2, and Xenpac transceivers, 300-pin transponders, ROSAs, eye-opening chips, TIAs, SERDES chips, PINs, APDs, and receivers with clean or real-world signals.  

The OST-RW automatically generates factory calibrated real-world SRS test signals at the 9.9 Gb/s and 10.3 Gb/s 10 GigE LAN/WAN rates, and the 10.5 Gb/s INCITS 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel standard rate. The OST-RW also generates signals at the ITU G.709 OTN 10.7 Gb/s rate.

OSTs are the de facto industry standard for SRS testing which means your test results will correlate with others performing SRS tests all over the world.  Additionally, the built-in process control enables you to keep getting the same SRS test results.   There are no complicated recipes to follow in order to generate the difficult to construct and hard to calibrate SRS test signal, just choose the variety of SRS signal you want from the graphical user interface and press start.

The OST-RW automatically performs SRS, sensitivity and overload tests using standards-defined SRS signals, variably degraded real-world signals or clean signals with PRBS patterns. The available OST-RW protocol option also provides you with the ability to conduct SRS, sensitivity and overload tests using 10 GigE LAN and WAN traffic, SONET, SDH, PoS, and OTN traffic.  The OST-RW displays a simple PASS or FAIL result at the conclusion of a test - based on criteria you set - either exactly to one of the standards or to your own specification. 

All the functionality needed to conduct SRS, sensitivity, overload and transmitter output power tests are included in the OST-RW including optical power meters, optical switches, attenuators, frequency synthesizers, clock sources, PRBS test pattern generator, stress conditioner, E/O and O/E converters, 4th order Bessel-Thomson filter, sinusoidal amplitude interferer, jittered clock sources, and BERT.  Protocol generators and analyzers are also included in the OST-RW when you order the protocol option.  Furthermore, tests are automated, with SRS, sensitivity and overload test results conveniently displayed on-screen for you with Circadiant’s Straight-Line BER Plot that makes it easy to see if a DUT has abnormal behavior like an error floor.  At the end of a test, you’ll have all the information you need to PASS or FAIL a DUT against an SRS standard, or against your own specifications.

The OST-RW tests 1310 nm and 1550 nm single mode DUTs to the –LR and –ER SRS standards and with the optional A3318 850 nm/Electrical Interface, the OST-RW also tests 850 nm multi-mode DUTs to the -SR standards.

In addition to using real-world test signals, you can use non-degraded test signals when making sensitivity and overload tests.  The Circadiant Straight-Line BER plot displays measured BER levels versus a range of optical powers or optical modulation amplitudes, and fits lines to the data points. The OST-RW will either automatically select the optical power ranges for you, or you can select the range yourself - anywhere from -40 dBm to 0 dBm.  Obtaining sensitivity measurements at exact BER levels with the OST-SRS is simple.  Sensitivity is automatically interpolated between measured data points, or extrapolated beyond measured data points.  This means quoting performance at the SRS 10-12 BER level is as simple as reading the value off of the display or forwarding supported Excel files.  With the OST-RW, there’s no need for you to use Mathcad type software to interpret test results – all the analysis is conducted with Circadiant’s powerful suite of statistical algorithms.

The automated overload test included in the OST-RW is similar to a sensitivity test, but is conducted with high-power signals rather than low-power signals.  Systems, modules and components that are operated back-to-back should have their high-power BER performance measured to ensure there is no sudden rise in the BER rate at levels that may be experienced in the field.  The OST-RW performs overload tests up to 0 dBm.  The real-world SRS signal may also be used when running an overload test to measure full operating range compliance of DUTs to the IEEE 802.3ae and the INCITS 10GFC standards. 

The automated transmitter output power test included in the OST-RW measures the optical power level of a transmitter and compares it to a defined acceptable range.  If the transmitter’s optical power level is within the specified range, the test returns a PASS.  If there is too much optical power, or not enough optical power, the test returns a FAIL. 

You may also use the OST-RW to control other test equipment such as digital sampling oscilloscopes, optical spectrum analyzers, optical switches, wavelength meters, power supplies and temperature chambers.  This allows you, for example, to run the same SRS test over and over, but with the DUT at different combinations of temperature and voltage so you will be sure your DUT meets the SRS standard over all its operating ranges.

Instead of dealing with complicated equipment setups, time-consuming equipment calibrations, complex SRS signal compounds, iterative equipment programming, correctly applying fiber optic test theory, and manipulating BER probability statistics - the OST-RW does it all for you.  With an OST-RW you’ll be making fast, consistent and correlated SRS, sensitivity, overload and transmitter output power measurements in no time…and you’ll have confidence that your systems, line cards, modules and components will work when deployed because you’ll have already tested them with real-world signals.

	Features and Specifications

Stressed Receiver Sensitivity

The 10 GigE LAN and WAN specification requires receivers to be tested using an optical signal that has both horizontal and vertical jitter, a poor extinction ratio and slow rise and fall times:

The OST provides test signals with factory calibrated degradations and sweeps over the jitter mask of 40 kHz to 10 times the loop bandwidth without the need for complex calibration procedures.

To configure a test, simply select the 10G BASE-L or 10G BASE-E test from the menu. When used with the A3318 850nm/Electrical OST Interface, 10G BASE-S may be selected. To perform FibreChannel SRS tests, the clock rate is set to 10.5 Gb/s.

Automated Tests

Straight Line BER

The OST plots test results on screen using a special scale that for well-behaved DUTs will have a linear plot of BER vs. average optical power or BER vs. OMA. This feature makes it easy to see if there are any problems with the DUT such as an error floor.

Protocol Capabilty (Optional)

Create 1 GigE, 10 GigE LAN/WAN, 10 Gb/s SONET/SDH, or 10.7 Gb/s OTN traffic to more thoroughly test devices and systems
in a real-world environment.

Optical Ports

Signal Output