Hardware Implementation of the Precision Time Base Technique for Digital Sampling Oscilloscopes on FPGA

In this paper we investigate implementing a Precision Time Base (PTB) technique to improve measurement jitter performance of digital sampling oscilloscopes (DSO) on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). To achieve better measurements, two reference signals are used to correct time-base errors and minimize jitter added by the DSO itself (minimize measurement jitter). We show experimentally that using the aforementioned technique, measurement jitter can be reduced from 1.3 pico-seconds (ps) to 280 femto-seconds (fs) (depending on the data rate and the pattern length) on a high-speed DSO.