ScanWorks® is first to support new Intel® Xeon® and Itanium® processors with validation and test tools

The ScanWorks platform is the first third-party platform with validation and test tools for the newly announced families of server processors, the Intel Xeon 5600 and 7500 series, and the Itanium 9300 series. In addition, ScanWorks has been enhanced to provide a comprehensive solution for high-speed input/output (I/O). ScanWorks remains the only tools environment supporting Intel’s Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST), that company’s embedded instrumentation technology for its leading chips and chip sets.

“With increasing signaling rates in modern platform designs, IBIST tools such as the ASSET ScanWorks platform have become necessary for the verification of those interfaces,” said Gene Pitts, Data Center Platform Application Engineering (DCPAE) Director at Intel. “More effective solutions for the verification of complex design challenges allow the industry to focus on other value-add aspects of their platform designs without risking design robustness.”

Intel has been embedding IBIST into its leading processors and chip sets while ScanWorks has provided a comprehensive validation and test solution for Intel-based designs and their high-speed input/output (I/O) buses, including Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI), PCI Express (PCIe), Direct Memory Interface (DMI) and Double Data Rate memory, third generation (DDR3).

The ScanWorks validation tools for Intel® IBIST include functionality to perform bit error rate testing (BERT) as well as margining tests. In validation applications, these types of tests can be employed to validate that the high-speed serial I/O buses on a circuit board design will perform as expected before the design moves into high-volume manufacturing.

“As Intel increases the capabilities of the Xeon and Itanium processor families and pushes the outer edge of the performance envelope in the server, workstation and high-performance computing (HPC) markets, tools to quickly validate and test new design platforms become increasingly critical,” said Tim Caffee, ASSET’s vice president of design validation. “It’s always a race for equipment manufacturers to get to market before the competition with servers based on new processors. Effective validation tools like ScanWorks are imperative to do this.”

Intel’s new Xeon processors are based on that company’s next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, but each series targets a different strata of the server market. The 32-nanometer (nm) 5600 series supports data center servers, workstations and high-performance computing systems with one or two processors and offers a high level of security. The 7500 series scales upwards to servers with as many as 256 processors and includes new reliability features for mission-critical server applications.

A typical architecture for a basic Intel® Xeon® design.

The Itanium processors target the high-end server market and are currently running 80 percent of the mission-critical server applications at the largest 100 companies in the world. The new Itanium 9300 series (codenamed Tukwila) doubles the performance of this processor family by increasing the number of cores of previous Itanium processors from two to four. New scalability and reliability features have been incorporated for high-availability corporate IT applications.

“For six years we’ve been the industry’s only provider of IBIST tools. During that time, we’ve gained a great deal of trust from Intel®. Both ASSET and Intel® have benefited from the relationship,” Caffee said. “We look forward to continuing this support with future Intel® platforms.”

For more information on the ScanWorks platform’s IBIST tools, click here.