New Jitter Separation Method for Debugging High-Speed Interfaces with the R&S®RTP Oscilloscope

The analysis of jitter components and its root cause is an increasingly important task for modern data communication systems. Increasing data rates on one hand and the cost pressure on board material, connectors, etc. on the other hand are driving factors for this analysis requirement.

There are several commercial products on the market, which analyze the jitter based on the reduction of the signal information to time interval error (TIE) measurements only.

This presentation suggests a new method to analyze and decompose jitter based on a parametric signal model. One key to this model is the estimation of the step response, which describes the deterministic behavior of the transmission system. The proposed algorithm takes all information present in the input signal into account. Once the model parameters are determined, various synthetic waveforms for different deterministic jitter components such as DDJ or PJ get reconstructed based on the original bit sequence. Finally, the individual jitter components are calculated based on the reconstructed waveforms, far more accurately, providing designers with analysis details previously not possible.

The new R&S(R)R&S jitter algorithm is implemented in the Advanced Jitter Analysis option for the R&S(R)RTP oscilloscope.