In today’s modern world of precision instrumentation and tight product development timelines, it’s important for engineers to be able to quickly analyze and modify their product ideas. In this article, find out how to carry out a theoretical analysis on the noise performance for a wide-bandwidth signal chain.
When designing a measurement signal chain, it is important to work through a noise analysis to determine if the signal chain solution will have low enough noise so that the smallest signal of interest can easily be extracted.
1. Declaring assumptions
For the noise analysis, or any analysis performed on a signal chain circuit, it is important to outline the assumptions made for each block in the signal chain.
2. Drawing a simplified schematic of the chain signal
From the signal chain solution, a simplified schematic is generated for each of the stages/blocks:
3. Calculating the equivalent noise bandwidth for each of the signal chain blocks
Using the formulas found in the full article, calculations are completed for the equivalent noise bandwidth for each block.
4. Calculating the noise contribution at the output of the signal chain for all blocks
Using the formulas found in the full article, calculations are completed for the noise contribution at the output of all blocks.
5. Adding all noise contributions
Conclusion
By following these steps, the designer will be able to analyze and calculate the noise performance of the chosen signal chain. The analysis provides useful insights on how different components in the signal chain affect the noise performance and how these could be minimized ensuring they create a signal chain proposal that extracts the smallest signal of interest, which helps save time and money.
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