Guest Column: Jitter - An Introduction

This article is part of a series of quarterly guest columns by Wolfgang Damm, International Product Management Director, Wireless Telecom Group.

Jitter is a key concern for engineers developing high-speed components such as transmitters, receivers, and data channels. Discussing the subject matter of jitter completely would exceed the scale of this article. Instead, it provides a general introduction to jitter, causes and methods of jitter measurements, specifically BER and the eye diagram. It also talks about examples of standards concerning jitter-tolerance-measurements for serial high-speed components and takes a closer look at the test setup for a serial high-speed PCI express receiver.