PRECISION SUBNANOSECOND DELAY MEASUREMENTS OF HIGH SPEED DIGITAL INTEGRATED CIRCUITS.

A system for providing detailed performance parameters of high speed integrated circuits requires a carefully designed signal source as well as operational considerations in order to obtain a resolution which is consistent with the circuit performance. This paper describes a signal source and a method for making precise measurements of high speed digital integrated circuit time delays by a frequency domain technique instead of direct time domain methods. Resolutions to 1 picosecond are possible with absolute accuracies approaching 10 picoseconds. It can be used to test a variety of circuit types and can be applied production environments. The text of this paper is in digest form.