Evaluation of Agilent 3458A Time Jitter Performance

This paper describes the mechanism of an Agilent 3458A sampling time jitter present when external triggering is used at synchronous two-channel sampling. Based on measurements, it is shown that the master digital multimeter (DMM) adds approximately 3.2 ns of its own time jitter while triggering the slave DMM and that the effective time jitter for externally triggered DMM remains at around 7 ns, well below ±50-ns maximum jitter as specified by the manufacturer.