Opamp current noise

This AN has some useful stuff:-

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I'm trying to remember what my 24 bit sound card's noise density is, but 17nV/rtHz comes to mind. If put a LT1115 preamp in there, you could get down below 2nV/rtHz and use that as an instrument to measure the noise density function.

Plus you get a free tracking generator output along with it.

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Thanks Spehro, The current noise gets =91trouble some=92 out beyond 100kHz. See figure bottom of page 4.

Making a big R kills the bandwidth. I=92ve got switches and terminal blocks in the front end, which give about 7pF of input C. Making some sort of difference measurement would be ideal. (It's fairly easy to see 1% change in the noise.)

George H.

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Thanks Robert. The issue isn't measureing the total noise, but getting a measure of the fraction that is due to the opamp current noise. Measuring the opamp voltage noise is a snap... just short the input.

George H.

Well, if the gain of the amplifier and its DC errors makes something saturate, that can fail. There's also opamp current noise at the inputs, and that responds to some kinds of thermal effects, which could be your major issue. Current noise doesn't diminish when you short an input.

Shot noise in a transistor base current (bipolar transistor) goes up with temperature, because current gain (beta) drops.

Well OK, but it works fine in this case.

There's also opamp current noise at the

Sure but the current noise contributes I^2*R^2 to the V^2 noise output.

There are Jfets on the input of opa134. They have a current noise that rises with frequency. (and temperature) I read somewhere what this is due to, but have now forgotten it. (too much beer.)

George H.

If you make the second amp a FET input one, it won't contribute current noise. Then the correlated part of the noise of the two amps will be just the current noise times R.

So bung the two of them into a multiplier, and lowpass filter the daylights out of the output.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

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I didn't mean total noise, but true "noise density function". The soundcard easily finds you noise density. I use it all the time.

How do you do it now, since at the output you have both current and voltage noise.

Floundering around a bit here, but I perceive simultaneous measurement [soundcard has two channels at 192kS/s] measure at input terminal measure at output terminal. then compare. Voltage noise is new at the output, but current noise also appears at the input, so with correlation you can discern which is which.

hat

OK that kills the opamp voltage noise. But won't the Johnson noise from the resistor get into both channels? That's going to be a much bigger contribution. I think the above switched circuit work. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so the measurement will have to wait.

George H.

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Well I've just ignored the current noise. If I keep the maximum frequency below 100kHz the current noise from the opa134 is below 1% of the total. If I believe the spec sheet! I guess that's what I wanted to confirm.

Yeah I think that's right. But the johnson noise from the resistor is correlated in both channels.

I must admit it's not obvious to me why the voltage noise of the opamp doesn't 'leak' out of the input.

George H.

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hmmmm...yes, it should divided by the Zinput ratio against the equivalent input impedance. But isn't the equiv input impedance usually much less than the Zinput? so the signal could get really small.

Yes, you'll see the Johnson noise, but you can jack up R until you start seeing the current noise clearly.

There are other things you can do with linear combinations of 3 or more amplifiers, e.g. putting two identical resistors in series, with two FET amps. The number of combinations goes up faster than the number of amps, so you rapidly get more equations than unknowns.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

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Thanks Phil, But it's a jfet input opamp. The current noise rises at high frequency. (Something like 100fA/rtHz at 100kHz and 1pA/rtHz at 1 MHz.) I'll only be able to see it at high frequency. On paper it shouldn't be a problem. But I started to worry that things might be worse than the spec sheet. And wanted to try and measure it.

George H.

A picoamp at 1 MHz is quite doable. You only need a few kilohms to make that bigger than the Johnson noise, and you can remove the Johnson noise by a first principles calculation.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

George Herold a écrit :

Noise current in JFets mainly comes from capacitive coupling (jfet internal parasitics) of noise voltage, hence the first order frequency dependency.

Beware that it's not the only current noise coupling mechanism in opamps. You also have input clamp diodes with parasitic capacitance which translates power supply voltage noise into current noise into the inputs. If you have something like a linear voltage regulator (78xx or such) which are notoriously noisy, you may have your noise source: 2pF at

160kHz and 0.5uV/rtHz of noise (yep they are that bad) gives you 1pA/rtHz of current noise.

A simple RC bypass cell on your opmap will fix that.

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Yeah, the bad news is that the bandwidth of the amp chain is 1-2 MHz. So its a bit tricky separating more noise 'amplitude' from bandwidth effects.

For the above (switched in amp) circuit, a man could worry about the extra input C of the second amp.

George H.

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Ahh, so if I measure the voltage noise and assume the capacitive coupling is about the same from device to device, then I've got a measure of the high frequency current noise.

That's useful. Thanks

I've got a cap multiplier on the opamp power lines. Noise is something less than 1nV/ rtHz. (It's actually kinda hard to measure (the PS noise) without a lower noise opamp (Some BJT one.)

George H.

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I had some idea of looking through the LTSpice jigs directory for noise measurement circuits but that may be a barren idea.

?-)