Patent ID: 8085837

Claim:
A method for characterizing jitter in a first continuous-time signal, the method comprising: (a) applying a first copy of the first continuous-time signal to a continuous-time feed-forward filter to generate a filtered, second continuous-time signal; (b) applying a second copy of the first continuous-time signal to a continuous-time timing recovery unit to derive a timing signal; (c) delaying the timing signal by a specified delay duration to generate a delayed timing signal; (d) sampling a third continuous-time signal based on the delayed timing signal to generate a first discrete-time signal; (e) slicing the first discrete-time signal to generate an output bitstream; (f) converting the output bitstream into a fourth continuous-time signal; (g) applying the fourth continuous-time signal to a continuous-time feed-back filter to generate a filtered, fifth continuous-time signal; (h) generating the third continuous-time signal based on a difference between the second continuous-time signal and the fifth continuous-time signal; and (i) characterizing an amount of jitter in the first continuous-time signal based on the specified delay duration.