Embedded.com Tech Focus Newsletter (10-6-14): Dealing with jitter in a ubiquitously connected environment

As our electronic devices become more connected and as their data rates go up and the content becomes more prone to noise and jitter problems, more will have to be done to sort through the complexities so they operate as they have been designed to.

As the industry moves to adopt the MIPI Alliance’s M-PHY standard, designers are encountering some significant challenges related to oscilloscope measurements and, more specifically, probing.

A quality of service analysis of various ad hoc wireless routing protocols on a Zigbee home automation network as measured by jitter, packet delivery, average end-to-end delay, jitter and throughput using a static IEEE 802.15.4 star topology.

An active jitter detection mechanism for the synchronization control in wireless multimedia networks that improves quality of service by discarding the jitter-corrupted packets immediately and balancing the delay and jitter actively.

Analysis of various network routing protocols and their suitability for use in wireless body area networks used in health care applications from the point of view of such metrics as jitter, packet delivery ratio, netwok throughput, average end to end delay, node and network throughput.

Getting that extra RMS jitter margin gives your hardware design a little extra room to breathe when estimating what’s needed to guarantee the system’s reliability and robustness.

You can’t rely on chip vendor specs about jitter because each vendor specifies it differently and it varies for different applications. It’s up to you to nail down the acceptable amount of jitter your design can tolerate. 

With the increasing system data rates, timing jitter has become critical in system design, especially where system performance limit is determined by the system timing margin, making it important to understand the impact of timing jitter.

There are many ways for separating jitter into its components. Depending on the tools you use and the system design framework, they all give somewhat different answers.

The problems faced in dealing with clock jitter in FPGA-based high-speed communications interfaces such as SerDes and how external phase locked loops (PLLs) can be used to resolve them.

Jitter has become a significant percentage of a signal's interval, making it increasingly important to fully understand its types and sources. Most high-speed serial designs now use multiple lanes. Thus, crosstalk is nearly unavoidable.

In this first of a three part series, two engineers at Analog Devices, Inc. examine the sources of clock jitter in designs based on advanced RISC and DSP architectures, how to characterize your system for such problems and then how to resolve them.

This series of three articles explores DDR2/DDR3 clock jitter specifications and provides guidance to embedded systems developers on how to apply them and deal with violations when systems encounter them. Part 1 ” Defining Clock Jitter

How to Simplify Connected Medical Device Software Integration and Certification

Managing the Chaos of Design Closure: How to regain control of your development schedule

On-Demand Webcast & Whitepaper: Java at Work in the Internet of Things Era