Auto-calibration techniques in built-in jitter measurement circuit

Abstract

This paper presents a built-in jitter measurement (BIJM) circuit with auto-calibration techniques for 1 GHz clock signal measurement. To measure the cycle-to-cycle jitter, a self-referenced circuit, without an external reference clock, is applied. A multi-phase oscillator (MPO) and a timing amplifier (TA) are used to enhance the timing resolution and to generate the high-speed multi-phase outputs for a multi-phase sampler (MPS). In order to against the process variation, the calibration circuits are applied to calibrate the MPO timing resolution and the TA gain. They are rewarded with a reduction of the variation of the MPO timing resolution by 65% and a reduction of the variation of the TA gain by 61.2% under the process variation, respectively.