Cost-effective and Accurate Solution for Jitter Performance Test in High-speed Serial Links

With the increasing demand for faster data communication, the data rate of communication systems has reached in the gigahertz range and higher. To accurately quantifying the transmission quality of high-speed I/Os with acceptable test time in production becomes one big challenge to ATE test engineers. The major hindrance is to fully measure jitter related specs accurately will lead to excessive cost of test (e.g., capital investment, time-to-market, test time), while BIST loopback testing can not promise a result with a high confidence level. This paper proposes one comprehensive solution for at-speed jitter performance testing on ATE, which includes jitter histogram testing, random jitter / deterministic jitter separation and jitter stardust testing. This solution has been implemented in volume production of a real device and the result shows its high accuracy and cost effectiveness.