Degradation

In telecommunication, degradation, which may be categorized as either "graceful" or "catastrophic", has the following meanings:

1. The deterioration in quality, level, or standard of performance of a functional unit.
2. In communications, a condition in which one or more of the required performance parameters fall outside predetermined limits, resulting in a lower quality of service.

There are several forms and causes of degradation in electric signals, both in the time domain and in the physical domain, including runt pulse, Voltage spike, jitter, wander, swim, drift, glitch, ringing, crosstalk, antenna effect (not the same antenna effect as in IC manufacturing), and phase noise.

 This article incorporates public domain material from the General Services Administration document "Federal Standard 1037C".

This electronics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e