On-chip short-time interval measurement system for high-speed signal timing characterization

In this paper, we present an on-chip short-time interval measurement circuit to characterize the ever-faster communication systems. The proposed circuit consists of time parameters extraction subcircuit and measurement subcircuit, which contain a charge pump, a comparator with hysteresis, a digital counter, and a capacitor. During the measurement, we control a current source and a current sink to charge or discharge a common capacitor, and record the time length ratio of the charging and discharging process. Using this method, we can easily measure most of the time-domain parameters. Also this method minimizes the impacts of the process variations to get high measurement accuracy.