1 Time Domain Jitter Measurements

Oscilloscopes are the main device used for time domain jitter measurements. Oscilloscopes allow for the easy viewing of waveforms and pulses, and are considered indispensable for any time and frequency lab. While there are many vendors who offer jitter measurement test packets, they are often provided at an additional cost. An oscilloscope that is high-speed (1GHz+) and has a high sampling bandwidth (10GS/s+) should be sufficient to gather the desired data. We also need to remember that time domain jitter measurements (specifically period and cycle-to-cycle) are random and expressed in terms of mean value and standard deviation over a number of samples. JEDEC standard 65 requires a minimum of 1000 samples, but a 10,000 sample minimum is preferred by most applications.