HFAN-04.5.1: Measuring Random Jitter on a Digital Sampling Oscilloscope

Abstract

Random jitter is playing an increasingly important role in today's high-speed digital communications systems. For example, SONET specifies that an optical transceiver has no more than 10mUI_RMS of random jitter (1 UI = 1 Unit Interval = 1 bit period). This would mean for a 10Gbps system, the random jitter must be less than or equal to 1ps_RMS. This application note describes an improved technique for measuring sub-picosecond random jitter. Read full article.