Patent ID: 7096133

Claim:
A method of establishing a benchmark for a figure of merit indicative of flicker noise of an amplifier circuit, comprising: receiving, for at least a measurement time interval, an output voltage of one of a plurality of amplifier circuits as a time domain voltage signal with a magnitude distribution, thermal noise voltage having a magnitude and flicker noise voltage having a profile; digitizing at least a portion of said time domain voltage signal corresponding to said measurement time interval to provide a corresponding plurality of time domain signal data; processing said plurality of time domain signal data in accordance with a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation to compute at least a portion of said flicker noise voltage profile below a corner frequency, wherein said flicker noise voltage profile comprises a voltage versus frequency profile with each one of a plurality of successively decreasing noise voltage magnitudes at a respective one of a plurality of successively increasing frequencies, and a last one of said plurality of successively decreasing noise voltage magnitudes is at said corner frequency and approximately equal to said thermal noise voltage magnitude; processing a portion of said plurality of time domain signal data corresponding to a portion of said measurement time interval to compute a time correlation parameter, a magnitude distribution parameter and a product of said time correlation and magnitude distribution parameters to produce one of a plurality of first coordinates; and repeating said receiving, digitizing and processings for each one of said plurality of amplifier circuits to produce said plurality of first coordinates and a plurality of second coordinates, wherein each one of said plurality of second coordinates comprises said corner frequency for a corresponding one of said plurality of amplifier circuits.