An analytical approach is presented for the jitter performance of a timing recovery circuit consisting of a prefilter, a zero-memory nonlinear device, and a narrow band postfilter tuned to the pulse repetition frequency. Assuming first a squarer type of nonlinearity, analytical expressions for the rms jitter in the timing wave are obtained as a function of the pre and post filtering characteristics. These expressions are suitable for judging the case where the baseband signal is bandlimited. Also for some specific examples, the jitter performance of this kind of STR circuit is evaluated.

Secondly, a general type of nonlinerity is assumed, and the rms jitter expressions are obtained in terms of the higher order moments of the input signal. The higher moments themselves are shown to be computed iteratively.

Finally some numerical results are obtained for the fourth order nonlinearity and the rms jitter curves are plotted as a function of the excess bandwidth factor γ, for several values of the quality factor Q of the postfilter.