The invention provides, in an embodiment, an apparatus, method and means
for unintrusively observing, echoing and reading signals transmitted by
one of a bus and wireless communication, without disturbing electrical
properties of the bus, without adding bus latency, and without adding
signal discontinuities. In an aspect, a buffer having a trigger is
coupled with a component that connects to a memory bus, the buffer echoes
signals to an observability port, and a diagnostic device reads the
echoed signals. In an aspect, the bus is one of a simultaneous
bi-directional (SBD) bus having ternary logic levels, a single ended bus,
a differential bus, an optically coupled bus, a chipset bus, a frontside
bus, an input/output (I/O) bus, a peripheral component interface (PCI)
bus, and an industry standard architecture (ISA) bus. In an aspect, the
buffer echoes bus signals having frequencies between 500 MHz. and 5 GHz.
In an aspect, the buffer echoes bus signals having frequencies of at
least 5 GHz.