A high accuracy high throughput jitter test solution on ATE for 3GBPS and 6gbps serial-ata

Jitter test in production is notorious for its long test time and the challenge of accuracy verification. Among various types of jitter, random jitter (RJ) is most challenging to test on automatic test equipment (ATE) because of its randomness. To be considered as a favorable jitter test in production for multi-gigabit devices, the RJ needs to be measured with sub-picosecond accuracy and the whole test time is expected to be in a few tens of milliseconds. However, no known solutions meet these criteria to our best knowledge. In this paper, we present a systematic solution for multiple giga-bit-per-second (Gbps) transmitter (TX) jitter testing on ATE. Our undersampling-based solution extracts jitter either from edge histograms in time domain or from the jitter spectrum in frequency domain. Both approaches provide a RJ precision better than plusmn0.5 ps and are capable of finishing the whole TX test within 100 ms. We have verified the solution with data rates up to 6 Gbps and applied it in mass production.