SNR Optimization for Common Emitter Amplifier

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effects of the thermal noise of the base resistance of common emitter amplifier (CEA) on the output SNR, and we show that a first order Butterworth filter at the output of the CEA significantly improves output SNR significantly and supress the performances of higher order Butterworth, Chebyshev I, II and elliptic filters. We propose a formula for the selection of cut-off frequency of analog filters for given orders to achieve significant SNR improvement at CEA output. Considering the filter complexity and output SNR improvement, we can conclude that the first order Butterworth filter outperforms Chebyshev I, II and elliptic filters.