What is Noise Figure & How to Measure It – What the RF (S01E05)

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Transcript: When working on your product’s design you’ll often want to optimize the sensitivity of your receiver. That’s where being able to characterize and improve your system’s noise figure becomes one of the important factors to consider.

What’s up everyone!! The name is Nick Ben and I’m an engineer here at Keysight… and welcome to the 5th episode of ‘What the RF!’

In today’s episode we’ll be discussing noise figure, including what it is and how to measure it.

Noise figure is one of the most important design considerations in the sense that it is a very efficient way to evaluate the performance of your device.. You can make noise figure measurements on complete systems or components. These include almost all multi-port devices from passive devices to active devices. Let's learn more about it.

Noise figure is the degradation of the SNR as a signal passes through a system or device. Noise figure tells us the relative amount of noise being added to the signal.

In our case, the device is this low noise amplifier.

To calculate noise figure we determine the ratio of the respective signal-to-noise power ratios at the input and output of the device. Device must be at a reference room temperature of 290 degrees kelvin.

Noise contribution in electronics is also caused by thermal agitation of electrons – or thermal noise. 290 kelvin was adopted by institutions as the standard temperature for determining noise figure.

The noise figure value is a number expressed in dB and indicates the performance of a device’s internal components like this amplifier.

A low noise figure is good and high noise figure is bad.

We see an example of a signal at an amplifier’s input in (a) and at its output in (b).

As you can see on the right, the noise level rises more than signal level due to the noise added by the amplifier’s circuits. This is the amplifier’s n ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj3chfPWAoY