Technical data

How the Serial BERT Uses Status Registers
You can determine the state of certain instrument hardware and firmware events
and conditions by programming the status register system.
The following subsections provide you with details about the Serial BERT's status
system.
Overview of the Serial BERT's Status System
The Serial BERT has status reporting features that give important information about
events and conditions within the instrument. For example, a flag may be set to
indicate the end of a measurement or perhaps a command error. To access this
information, it is necessary to query a set of registers using SCPI.
Serial BERT's Status System Structure
The Serial BERT's status system is comprised of multiple registers that are
arranged in a hierarchical order. The lower-level status registers propagate their
data to the higher-level registers in the data structures by means of summary bits.
The Status Byte register is at the top of the hierarchy and contains general status
information for the Serial BERT's events and conditions. All other individual
registers are used to determine the specific events or conditions.
For figures showing Serial BERT's status registers, see “Serial BERT Register
Model” on page 27.
Status Register Group Model
The following figure illustrates the typical structure of a status register.
Event
Register
Event Enable
Register
Condition
Register
Bit 1
Bit 0
Bit 15
Transition
Filter
PTRans
NTRans
PTRans
NTRans
PTRans
NTRans
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Bit 1
Bit 0
Bit 15
Bit 1
Bit 0
Bit 15
As shown in this figure, most status registers actually consist of five registers:
• Condition
Recommended Programming Techniques 3
Agilent J-BERT N4903B High-Performance Serial BERT 25