Masahiro Ishida, Researcher, Advantest Laboratories, Ltd.
Takahiro J. Yamaguchi, Manager, Advantest Laboratories, Ltd.
Mani Soma, Professor, University of Washington

This paper presents a method for testing jitter tolerance of SerDes receivers using the timing misalignment between the jittered source clock and the recovered clock. The method injects random jitter into the serial bit stream and measures the jitter transfer function of the CDR in the SerDes receiver to estimate the jitter tolerance. The paper derives an equation for estimating BER accurately using jitter transfer function of SerDes CDRs. The method is much faster than the conventional BERTS method. The accuracy and test speed of the method are verified by 2.5 Gbps-SerDes experiments.