Thermal noise analysis of switched-capacitor integrators with correlated double sampling

Abstract

Correlated double-sampling (CDS) is widely used to suppress the effect of flicker noise in switched-capacitor (SC) circuits. Once the flicker noise is suppressed by CDS, the noise of the SC circuits is ultimately determined by the thermal noise. In this work, we develop a method to calculate the thermal noise in SC integrators as functions of a variety of circuit parameters such as capacitor size and switch resistance; this methodology is then applied to a CDS integrator as well as a conventional integrator. We found that for the CDS integration scheme, in order to avoid significantly increasing the noise power of the integrator, the size of the CDS capacitor should be comparable to that of the sampling capacitor. We also found that if the CDS capacitor is sufficiently large, the noise power of a CDS integrator is almost the same as that of a conventional integrator with the same sampling capacitor size. These findings are explained based on the bandwidth of the transfer functions.