Jitter option enhances oscilloscopes debugging capabilities

As data rates increase and voltage swings decrease, the jitter in digital interfaces becomes a significant percentage of the signaling interval, and potential source of failures. Increasingly, engineers require tools that accurately characterize the signal jitter including the break-down into its individual components.

The new R&S RTO-/ RTP-K133 advanced jitter analysis option introduces an analytic approach to separating the individual components of jitter such as random jitter, and deterministic jitter components, such as data dependent and periodic jitter. This approach is based on a parametric signal model that fully characterizes the behavior of the transmission link under test.

A core benefit of this Rohde & Schwarz method is that the jitter model includes the complete waveform characteristic of the signal under test, in contrast to conventional methods that reduce the data to a set of Time Interval Error measurements.

The result is consistent measurement data even for relatively short signal sequences, plus previously unavailable information such as the step response, or a distinction between vertical and horizontal periodic jitter. Engineers benefit from in-depth details with jitter representations such as 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 Rohde & Schwarz 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.”

This new jitter separation option extends the signal integrity debugging functions for engineers, complementing the industry’s only integrated time-domain reflectometry (TDR)/ time-domain transmissometry (TDT) measurement, and real-time de-embedding capabilities in a single oscilloscope.

The option R&S RTx-K133 for R&S RTO and R&S RTP oscilloscopes is now available from Rohde & Schwarz