Jitter

As high-speed data and communication systems become faster, the timing requirements of digital components has become tighter. Jitter can degrade system performance making the timing requirements even tighter.

Understanding jitter and jitter characteristics is essential to making accurate jitter measurements. Unfortunately, there are many different definitions of jitter. Regardless of the particular definition, they all attempt to quantify the undesirable high-frequency time variation of signal events. A signal event, in this general definition, is some recognizable waveform feature such as a voltage threshold crossing. The term undesirable high-frequency is used in this definition to distinguish jitter from the undesirable lower-frequency time variation between signal events commonly referred to as wander. The frequency value used to separate jitter and wander is application dependent and commonly determined by a clock recovery cutoff frequency.

Keysight provides Jitter/Noise analysis for more in-depth jitter measurement and analysis.