An on-chip timing jitter measurement circuit using a self-referenced clock and a cascaded time difference amplifier with duty-cycle compensation

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a reference-free, high-resolution on-chip timing jitter measurement circuit. It combines a self-referenced clock and a cascaded time difference amplifier (TDA) with duty-cycle compensation, which results in reference-free, high-resolution timing jitter measurement without sacrificing operational speed. The test chip was designed and fabricated in 65 nm CMOS. Measured results of the proposed circuit show the possibility of detecting a timing jitter of 1.61-ps RMS in 820 MHz clock with less than 4% error.