A new tail-fit method design for jitter decomposition

Although decreasing IC feature size and increasing I/O speed enable better system capability and performance, they also introduce technological challenges. One of the most important challenges is as I/O speed increases: jitter should decrease accordingly to ensure a reasonable bit error rate (BER) for a link system. Precise jitter characterization of signals at critical internal nodes provides valuable information for hardware fault diagnosis and next generation design. Understanding the separate contributions to jitter is challenging in this high speed industrial world. In this paper, Bounded Uncorrelated Jitter (BUJ), Random Jitter (RJ) and Periodic Jitter (PJ) are examined. A method is proposed to find BUJ in the presence of RJ, by first estimating RJ and then finding BUJ through de-convolution. A new tail-fit method is proposed to estimate the probability distribution for RJ. This new tail fit method is applicable for the general signal histogram, while the traditional tail fit method is only valid for the specific or ideal signal histogram.