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The noise behavior of bulk CMOS devices is dominated primarily by two noise sources: thermal noise and flicker (1/f) noise. Other sources that are sometimes present in the noise spectrum are shot noise, generation/recombination noise, and “popcorn ” noise. Of these sources, thermal noise and shot noise are physically fundamental to the operation of the device and are always present. The quality of the manufactured device (the number of defects in the bulk silicon, in the gate oxide, and in the various interfaces) determines the level of generation/recombination noise and popcorn noise. It is probable that flicker noise appears through both quality-dependent and fundamental noise processes. 1 Noise Notation Following van der Ziel’s [1] lead, common practice in the literature uses two-level subscripts, for example, SID to denote the spectral density of the drain current. Unfortunately, this author can’t stand the sight of two-level subscripts, so he reluctantly uses a different notation for noise variables. In IEEE notation, as described in the Standard [2], variables are named with the following convention:

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When evaluating an amplifier’s performance for a low noise application, both internal and external noise sources must be considered. This application note briefly discusses the fundamentals of both internal and external noise and identifies the