Relationship Between Phase Noise and Jitter

As stated in the article ‘PHASE NOISE / JITTER IN CRYSTAL OSCILLATORS’ Phase Noise and Jitter are both ways of describing the stability of an oscillator. Phase Noise describes the stability in the frequency domain whilst jitter describes the stability in time domain. The choice of which domain to consider the oscillators stability is usually application dependant. RF Engineers working in Radar, Base Station design etc. will be interested in Phase Noise as poor Phase Noise performance will affect up/down conversions and channel spacing. Digital Engineers working in Time Division Multiplexing (the majority of modern Telecoms infrastructure) will be interested in Jitter as poor Jitter performance will result in network slips and excessive re-send traffic.