Effects of frame jitter in data acquisition systems

This paper focuses on the analysis of frame jitter and the impact of data acquisition architecture on the associated disturbances to the acquired record. Frame jitter leads to the same random shift of all samples in an acquired record. It results in errors in the estimates of time intervals, and makes consecutive records slightly incoherent - compromising data averaging procedures. Two complementary algorithms are developed for the quantification of frame jitter, and their performance has been simulated and verified by experiment. They allow the estimation of the standard deviation of the frame jitter using a low-resolution instrument even in noisy environments. An expression for the minimum value of the standard deviation of the frame jitter has been obtained and verified experimentally for typical architectures of data acquisition systems. It is shown that this value could be reduced by specific improvements in the design of data acquisition system architectures.