A low cost jitter separation and characterization method

Abstract

Clock jitter is a crucial factor in high speed and high performance application. Traditional jitter measurement method relies on precise and expensive instrumentations. This paper proposes a low cost jitter measurement and separation method. Instead of using traditional time internal analysis equipment, a simple Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) is used as the jitter measurement device. The clock under test is applied as the sampling clock of an ADC while the ADC is sampling a full scale sine wave. The ADC output contains the information of the clock jitter. The algorithm will separately detect the effects of Periodic Jitter, Dual-Dirac Jitter and Random Jitter, and accurately compute the rms value of each jitter component. This method offers great potential for wide use in low cost applications and especially in on-chip or on-board jitter measurement applications. Simulation results demonstrate the functionality, accuracy and robustness of the proposed low-cost jitter measurement method.