A Look at Transmission-Line Losses

Figure 1: Using a 3D
field solver to simulate
a differential trace

In surveying the subject of debugging high-speed serial data links, we've noted that there's no one cause for signal-integrity issues between transmitter and receiver, and there's certainly no one solution. But let's begin with the low-hanging fruit: electrical losses in the transmission line. We've previously done a series of posts on transmission lines (beginning here), but it's worth it to have a quick refresher.

The History of Jitter (Part V)

Figure 1: Applying PLLs for clock-data recovery is not
unlike tapping your feet to the beat of music

A milestone in the history of jitter measurement came in the 1990s with receivers that could reveal the slowly varying component of jitter that became evident in time-interval error (TIE) tracks. That led to the advent of using phase-locked loops (PLLs) for clock-data recovery. In turn, PLLs opened new horizons in jitter analysis.