A statistical study of the effectiveness of BIST jitter measurement techniques

This paper describes a statistical study of the effectiveness of state-of-the-art built-in-self-test (BIST) jitter measurement techniques. Many BIST solutions under-sample the signal under test, estimating the jitter in a system based upon a subset of the total number of clock edges. In this paper, we explore how under-sampling affects the accuracy of jitter measurements, and demonstrate a technique for estimating the actual jitter using a Gaussian distribution estimation. Our theoretical results were verified through a simulation study and comparison to experimental data collected from a 400 MHz phase-locked loop supplied by an industry sponsor.