An improved method of ADC jitter measurement

Abstract

This paper describes an original and highly accurate method for measuring analog to digital converters jitter. Previous works cover the "locked" histogram test which is generally used to estimate aperture uncertainty. This new method uses substraction techniques in a dual-channel sampling system. Synthesizers phase noise, voltage noise and ADC nonlinearities are removed to give the sum of both ADC's jitter. Then a third ADC is used to determine one ADC jitter value by 3 consecutive measurements. A significant improvement is demonstrated.