The Eye Diagram in digital broadcasting & communications test-gear

 What is an “Eye” in the sense of an “Eye Diagram” in the digital broadcast world?  I saw an advert mentioning one in TV-Bay magazine.

  • http://cnx.org/content/m18662/latest
    • The eye diagram provides a powerful visualization tool to interpret the behavior of the received waveform regardless of the pulse shape.
    • The eye diagram reveals important performance metrics for a communication link, including noise margin, ISI, timing sensitivity, and zero-crossing jitter. In addition, the eye diagram shows the optimum sampling time for the receiver to regenerate a bitstream from the received signaling waveform.
  • From my interpretation of a figure in the article at the above link:
    • The vertical size of the eye’s “iris ” is noise margin (amplitude), the horizontal size of the “iris” is timing error sensitivity.

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