Jitter test in production for high speed serial links

With high-end ATE pins going beyond multi-gigahertz, and widely adopted on-chip PRBS BIST, multi-gigahertz at-speed functional test in production is no longer impossible. The most controversial area is now in jitter testing. 1. The new definitions of jitter In the last few years, more and more serial link standards adopted the concept of separating jitter into deterministic jitter (DJ), periodic jitter (PJ) and random jitter (RJ). The old concept of histogram based peak-to-peak jitter has been replaced by the concept of total jitter (TJ), which is associated with a certain bit-error-rate for the serial link (typically 10-12). This makes the jitter test more meaningful with a direct connection to system performance. It is much harder to perform a proper jitter test directly in production, as it is specified in terms of DJ, PJ, RJ and TJ, rather than a