IEEE In high-speed interconnect systems, timing jitter has become a very important impairment that reduces the bit-errorrate performance of such systems. Timing jitter is produced by multiple phenomena like clock drift, mismatch impedance, intersymbol interference and crosstalk. Typically, the well-known 2D bathtub curve is a testing method used to analyzed the timing jitter at a specific bit-error-rate. A novel 3D bathtub curve to characterize deterministic timing jitter is presented. This proposal shows the bit-error-rate as function of the signal-to-noise ratio and the sampling point of the received signal in the unit interval. In addition, this study provides an analytical expression to generate the 3D bathtub curve, and in this way to predict the theoretical system performance of high-speed interconnect systems.
