Know Your Jitter When Debugging

Jitter is a fact of life in test and measurement. No matter how cleverly you craft your circuit, no matter how many precautions you take in every step of the design process to minimize noise sources, jitter will appear in your clock signal or serial bus data, regardless. For some engineers, jitter may not cast a long shadow over their designs. For others, however – often those working with very high-precision, high-speed applications – it is an extremely important consideration. Whether you are designing for arbitrary wave-form generation, data transmission equipment, or medical imaging devices, reducing the uncertainty of where edge crossings occur can be crucial to understanding how jitter affects a system.

Modern tools offer features that make jitter analysis significantly easier than in decades past. Not only are there more intuitive user interfaces on test equipment but there are also increasingly sensitive and accurate analysis tools. This white paper is designed to provide you with a toolbox of educational content on how to look for, assess, and address jitter in your signal verification tasks, such as meeting your specified jitter budget.