Oscilloscope signal integrity debugging with innovative jitter decomposition approach

Rohde & Schwarz has created a novel and powerful technique for analysing the individual components of jitter, affording electronic circuit designers with previously unavailable in-depth knowledge invaluable for debugging high-speed signals.

The new R&S RTO-/RTP-K133 advanced jitter analysis option offers an analytic approach to separating the unique components of jitter such as random jitter, and deterministic jitter components, including data-dependent and periodic jitter. This method is based on a parametric signal model that completely characterises the behaviour of the transmission link under test.

A core benefit of this method is that the jitter model incorporates the entire waveform characteristic of the signal under test, in contrast to conventional methods that decrease the data to a set of Time Interval Error measurements. The result is consistent measurement data whether for relatively short signal sequences, plus previously unavailable information such as the step response, or a difference between vertical and horizontal periodic jitter. Engineers profit from in-depth details with jitter representations including synthetic eye diagrams, histograms of all individual jitter components, spectral and peak views of periodic jitter, and the bathtub plot for estimating bit error rate.

Josef Wolf, senior vice president and head of the company's oscilloscope division is certain that the R&S RTO-/RTP-K133 option will be very well received; “We are proud to introduce an advanced method, and first really new approach to improve jitter separation for oscilloscopes in almost 20 years. With our new advanced jitter option, we help engineers to get additional insight about the jitter characteristics of their signal that were not previously available.”

DesignCon 2020, January 28-30, Santa Clara, CA, Booth #623