What is Error Location Analysis?

Error location analysis is the study of precise bit error positions inside a data stream, for the purpose of finding correlations or relationships between errors. The analysis results can be used to pinpoint the cause of errors. Error location analysis is integrated into the BERTScope/BitAlyzer to allow you to dig deeper into a problem when regular bit error ratio measurements are not enough.

Error location analysis uses information collected by the analyzer during a measurement, defining the bit position of every error occurrence. Rather than just counting errors, the BERTScope/BitAlyzer knows exactly when each error happened. With this information, the analysis engine of the BERTScope/BitAlyzer studies the list of all errors and presents results in various ways. This analysis helps to distinguish random error from systematic error, burst error problems, pattern sensitivity of bit errors, or correlations of errors to phenomena deep inside your system. This analysis can even be used to show what improvements error correction codes could make, by collecting error location data on an uncorrected system and computing the corrected results based on an error correction architecture that you set up to mimic possible correction schemes.

The next step is to learn more about what each type of analysis is, and how you would decide what type of analysis to do first.