Noise of current source in Teachspin’s Noise Fundamentals.

Measurements made to check for excess noise in high Meg resistors in the current source. (1 G
ohm at 10nA and 100M ohm at 100nA)

Input circuit was configured as a TIA with a feed back resistor of 10 Meg ohm. using an OPA134
opamp. (A 100Meg ohm feed back resistor was tried but the bandwidth was too small... perhaps
only 300 Hz or so.)

Signal chain after TIA first stage was AC coupled into gain of 100 stage. (10uF cap into 1k ohm
load.) Then filtered with 2-pole Butterworth low pass filter, frequencies from 100kHz to 1kHz.
Followed by another variable gain stage and an analog multiplier used as a squarer. The current
noise referred to the input is plotted below. The input signal is rolled off because of the few pF of
capacitance in parallel with the 10Meg ohm feed back resistor.

2.20E-027
Open circuit noise
2.00E-027
10nA current source
1.80E-027 100nA current source
1.60E-027

1.40E-027
Amps /Hz

1.20E-027
2

1.00E-027

8.00E-028

6.00E-028

4.00E-028

2.00E-028

0.00E+000
1000 10000 100000
Frequency (Hz)

The current noise of the open circuit is dominated by the 10Meg resistor, which has a Johnson
current noise of about 1.6 E –27 Amps2/Hz. There is a small (~10%) correction for the effective
bandwidth of the two pole Butterworth filter that was not applied to the data.

freq (Hz) gain open circuit V^2 10nA (V^2) 100nA (V^2)
100k 100 X 400 7.34 11.5 12.1
33k 100 X 500 6.26 8.24 8.75
10k 100 X 800 8.30 9.50 10.2
3.3k 100 X 1000 5.52 5.85 6.26
1k 100 X 1000 1.70 1.78 1.97