Jitter limitations on multi-carrier modulation

A feasibility study is made of an OFDM system based on analog multipliers and integrate-and-dump blocks, targeted at Gb/s copper interconnects. The effective amplitude variation of the integrator output caused by jitter is explained in an intuitive way by introducing correlation plots. For a given rms jitter and error rate, high frequency carriers allow for less modulation depth than low frequency carriers. A jitter limit on the total system bit rate is calculated, which is a function of rms jitter, bandwidth, and specified system symbol error rate. It is concluded that, because of the high sensitivity to timing errors inherent in OFDM, traditional PAM systems with equal bandwidth and error rate are more feasible.