Agilent teams with Elektrobit on FlexRay test tools

Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced a partnership to license certain automotive-network products in Elektrobit Corp.'s FlexRay product line, technology that Elektrobit gained as part of the Decomsys GmbH acquisition earlier this year. The cooperation is expected to create an integrated design and test toolset for software and test engineers.

The Agilent Vehicle Protocol Tester Series 1000—derived from Decomsys::Busdoctor 2 and Decomsys::Vision products—allows automotive engineers to test and validate the robustness of their FlexRay network communication with high-performance protocol analysis and signal measurement capabilities.

Agilent and Elektrobit already cooperate to provide FlexRay triggering and protocol-decode measurements in Agilent's MSO6000 oscilloscope. This partnership now extends Agilent's FlexRay test offering with FlexRay protocol analysis products.

Agilent now provides vehicle network communication test tools for all major protocols ranging from LIN and CAN to FlexRay, addressing the increasing complexity of the vehicle network topology and the need for higher network bandwidth and higher reliability.

Elektrobit continues to provide FlexRay and CAN measurement and cluster emulation products and will extend these solutions with ECU software analysis and debugging functions. These products will reduce the development complexity for the ECU software developer.

Elektrobit and Agilent will share FlexRay technology and software components, assuring the compatibility of data formats in the design and validation process. Customers using Elektrobit's FlexRay software design tools in conjunction with Agilent's FlexRay communication test tools benefit from a consistent design flow.

Agilent's FlexRay test product offering includes:

The Agilent Vehicle Protocol Tester Series 1000 (VPT1000), which has intuitive PC software that provides unique FlexRay protocol analysis, single-click signal insight and programmable fault injection, complemented by highly sophisticated standalone data logging. The VPT1000 has two FlexRay, two CAN interfaces, analog inputs and digital I/Os.

The VPT1000 together with the Agilent MSO6000 oscilloscope provides the leading time-correlated slot/segment boundary display of the global FlexRay timing schedule on an oscilloscope.

The Agilent MSO8000 oscilloscope offers real-time FlexRay eye-diagrams and jitter measurements with sophisticated signal integrity failure analysis mechanisms of the electrical FlexRay bus.

The Agilent J8130A Vehicle Protocol Tester Series 1000 is already available. Pricing for typical configurations consisting of the hardware module only start at $5,500. Combined with the PC software, the product pricing starts at $10,900.