Jitter analysis using eye diagram – Part 1

Hello

For those who have been in sync with my course on Static timing analysis, will already know this topic very well. For those who haven’t, donot worry. This is the perfect blog for you. And also, this will make you realize how different and exclusive our course on STA is

What we know is, we model jitter as ‘clock uncertainty’. The question (that everyone is keen to know), who decides jitter or uncertainty value. Well, there is physics behind this, and (donot worry) we will not go into much details, but in brief

This is where an eye diagram is really helpful. Stay with me and I will conclude what an eye diagram is, why is it called an ‘eye’ diagram and how do we get ‘jitter’ values

To begin with, look into the below flop clock pin. It expects 2 versions of clock signal (say for eg.) – the real one and the inverted one:

Now by just overlapping the equivalent edges of these waveforms, we can get a basic ‘eye’ for them as below

But, in reality, (considering silicon surface variation), the clock, which is supposed to arrive at ‘t’ ns, might not always arrive at ‘t’ns, but at t+x or t-x or t+2x, etc. You can think of silicon surface as a ‘road’, and distance from the clock port to any flop clock pin is ‘say’ 1mile. It’s not always possible for a car to cover 1 mile always at same time. Same thing is with clock edge as well.

Below is how the clock edge arrival varies at flop clock pin. (look at both version of clock below):

And this is how the resulting ‘eye’ looks like

I think, till now, you fairly know what an eye diagram is. But let me tell you, that’s not all. We account for the power supply variations as well (voltage droop and ground bounce) while creating the ‘eye’ and the ‘eye’ becomes more and more realistic, that helps you to get an accurate jitter value.
I thing I can promise, after watching my videos or reading my blog, you will never forget what you learnt
“Knowledge is not what you can remember, but what you cannot forget.”
Happy Learning
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