Eye diagram

In telecommunication, an eye pattern, also known as an eye diagram, is an oscilloscope display in which a digital signal from a receiver is repetitively sampled and applied to the vertical input, while the data rate is used to trigger the horizontal sweep. It is so called because, for several types of coding, the pattern looks like a series of eyes between a pair of rails. It is an experimental tool for the evaluation of the combined effects of channel noise and intersymbol interference on the performance of a baseband pulse-transmission system. It is the synchronised superposition of all possible realisations of the signal of interest viewed within a particular signaling interval.

Several system performance measures can be derived by analyzing the display. If the signals are too long, too short, poorly synchronized with the system clock, too high, too low, too noisy, or too slow to change, or have too much undershoot or overshoot, this can be observed from the eye diagram. An open eye pattern corresponds to minimal signal distortion. Distortion of the signal waveform due to intersymbol interference and noise appears as closure of the eye pattern.

The eye diagram of a binary PSK system

The eye diagram of the same system with multipath interference(MI) effects added

Eye diagram of a 4 level PAM signal

There are many measurements that can be obtained from an eye diagram:

Amplitude measurements

Time measurements

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