Jitter Measurements of High-Speed Serial Links

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Jitter is one of the most important issues in the design and operation of high-speed serial links. This article focuses on a jitter characterization method based on scanning the bit-error rate within the eye diagram -- also known as the BERT scan method. This jitter measurement procedure is applied to a serializer/deserializer (SERDES) chip and to parallel optical devices (PODs) operated at data rates up to 3.125 Gbps. The SERDES chip used consists of a number of ASIC cores with built-in self-test (BIST) functions and pre-emphasis capability. It is shown that the BERT scan method can be applied to the BIST functions to optimize different SERDES settings and to obtain optimum transmission quality.

By: Marcel A. Kossel and Martin L. Schmatz

Published in: IEEE Design and Test of Computers, volume 21, (no 6), pages 536-543 in 2004

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