Jitter Decomposition in High-Speed Communication Systems

Jitter impairs the bit-error rate in high-speed communication systems. Jitter decomposition is important for accurately deriving the total jitter in a system and for aiding in identifying the root causes of jitter. We extend a previous approach for jitter decomposition in clock signals is to enable separation of correlated and uncorrelated jitter in both data and clock signals. We use time lag correlation functions with special test patterns to estimate the characteristic parameters of different jitter components such as peak-to-peak value of DDJ and RMS value of RJ. Our approach can be implemented using only one-shot capture instead of multiple captures to average out the uncorrelated jitter from the correlated jitter. Hardware measurements are presented to validate the proposed technique.