By: Autumn Wright, Connor Shugg

The Cisco Internal S-Parameter Viewer, or SPTool, is a comprehensive MATLAB tool for viewing and analyzing scattering parameters (S-Parameters). Development started in the summer of 2017 as a joint effort between another intern, Connor Shugg, and I but I took over the project for the summer of 2018. It was designed to the specification of my team members in the Cisco RTP Signal Integrity (SI) Team to display Touchstone .SnP files, and hosts a number of features such as:

• Port reordering
• Power sum calculation
• Channel Operating Margin (COM) code calculations
• The ability to graph the decibel, phase angle, or time-domain reflectometry of S-Parameters in single-ended or differential format
• A versatile channel selector
• Support for plotting multiple files at once

The tool employs a model-view-controller architecture to handle user input, receiving it from the user interface, interpretting it in the controller, doing any necessary calculations in the model, and then sending the results back to the view. One of the main challenges of development was adding requested features with little understanding of signal integrity concepts. Through a lot of communication and intuition I was able to assist my team's hardware development through this tool.