Signal Reconstruction Errors in Jittered Sampling

One of the most significant types of error in digital signal processing (DSP) systems working with wideband signals is the error introduced by the analog-to-digital (AD) and digital-to-analog (DA) converters. This paper presents an accurate and simple method to evaluate the performance of AD/DA converters affected by clock jitter, which is based on the analysis of the mean square error (MSE) between the reconstructed signal and the original one. Using an approximation of the linear minimum MSE (LMMSE) filter as reconstruction technique, we derive analytic expressions of the MSE. In particular, through asymptotic analysis, we are able to simply evaluate the performance of digital signal reconstruction as a function of the clock jitter, number of quantization bits, signal bandwidth and sampling rate.