A BIST method to measure jitter without external references is presented. Measured data from 0.25- m BiCMOS chips show jitter resolution about 30 to 50 ps over 8 cycles of a 1 GHz input signal. The measurement technique uses the clock signal under test to control the charging of the input capacitance of an ADC. One advantage of this design is that it does not require an external jitter-free reference clock or a voltage reference. Design improvements from architectures to circuits are discussed and the method has potentials in other timing measurement applications.

Fingerhut Business Intelligence (BI) has a long and successful history of building statistical models to predict consumer behavior. The models constructed are typically segmentation-based models in which the target audience is split into subpopulations (i.e., customer segments) and individually tailored statistical models are then developed for each segment. Such models are commonly employed in the direct-mail industry; however, segmentation is often performed on an ad-hoc basis without directly considering how segmentation affects the accuracy of the resulting segment models. Fingerhut BI approached IBM Research with the problem of how to build segmentation-based models more effectively so as to maximize predictive accuracy. The IBM Advanced Targeted Marketing-Single EventsTM (IBM ATM-SETM) solution is the result of IBM Research and Fingerhut BI directing their efforts jointly towards solving this problem. This paper presents an evaluation of ATM-SE's modeling capabilities using data from Fingerhut's catalog mailings.