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Why Not Test at The Frequency of The Ethernet Signal - Blue Jeans Cable
Why Not Test at The Frequency of The Ethernet Signal - Blue Jeans Cable
Why Not Test at The Frequency of The Ethernet Signal - Blue Jeans Cable
(1) Digital waves are square-ish: The ideal digital signal is a square wave -- instantaneous transitions in
voltage between different discrete voltage levels. But square waves are problematic -- impossible to
actually generate, and if we come close enough to generating them it can cause noise problems. The
transitions, though not quite "square," are still sharp and sudden. Such a wave contains not only the
primary frequency (for a 10101010... signal, 1/2 the bitrate) but also its odd harmonics -- so even a
simple up-down at 100 MHz, say, has a large harmonic component at 300 MHz, and if we can't convey
that harmonic faithfully we will lose a lot of the sharpness of the transitions -- very important to the
receiving circuit.
(2) Digital waves are not perfectly periodic: If a digital signal contained the same sequence again and
again, as in our simplified 10101010... example, it could convey no information. Encoding information into
it inherently causes it to be unpredictable and this means that its "frequency" is not as easy to
characterize. A sequence that goes 10101010 is oscillating at the bitrate (with the fundamental frequency,
since one Hertzian wave is an up and a down, being 1/2 that bitrate), while a sequence that goes
110011001100 is oscillating at 1/2 the bitrate (but with the transitions just as sharp, so that now not only
the 3rd harmonic, but also the 5th harmonic, becomes important to keeping those rising and falling slopes
high). And a signal that's random-looking in sequence, of course, has a frequency profile which is all over
the place.
(3) Multi-level encoding -- the signals are not just ones and zeros, but are multiple voltage values within
a range -- means that what's going on is actually still more complex than that.
The result is that a data stream does not have "a" frequency around which it centers, but instead
occupies a considerable band of frequencies. Let's take 100-BASE-TX as an example. We run it on Cat 5e
cable, and the cable is tested all the way from 1 to 100 MHz. If we hook up a spectrum analyzer to the
data stream, what does it look like? Here, courtesy of Paul Kish at Belden, is a chart showing the signal
spectral density of a 100BASE-TX signal:
As you can see, far from having "a" frequency, the signal occupies a very broad frequency range. Mr.
Kish's graph ends at 150 MHz, which is a full 50 MHz beyond the testing requirements for the cable, but
as you can see, the high-frequency components of the signal still haven't petered out completely -- and
those high frequencies are part of what's conveying the sharpness of transitions in the signal.
And so...
Should Ethernet cable be tested at the frequency at which it operates? Well, yes. But to get that
statement to read correctly, for the expression "the frequency" we need to substitute "the frequencies."
Because these signals are very wide-bandwidth phenomena, the testing criteria for them need to evaluate
performance not just within a narrow range, but within a big chunk of spectrum. The applicable Ethernet
cabling specs do, in fact, just this -- Cat 5e being tested to 100 MHz, Cat 6 to 250 MHz, and Cat 6a to 500
MHz.
How can you know that these criteria are met? There's really only one way, and that's to test every
last cable assembly on a certification tester like our Fluke. Good cable and good connectors can be made
into poor assemblies; and bad cable and bad connectors will not make good assemblies no matter what
the skills of the assembler may be. The key is quality control throughout the process: quality cable
manufacture, quality connector manufacture, quality assembly, and quality verification assured by testing
each individual assembly.