Search This Blog

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Noise Floor De-Embedding and Cross Correlation

EDN Has published a article written by me on the topic of,

Measuring small signals accurately: A practical guide


This topic is of interest to anyone who needs to make spectral based measurements near or below the measuring instruments noise floor. 

Topics include:
* Noise floor De-Embedding
* Cross Correlation

#1 - Many articles have presented the "Noise Floor De-embedding" technique, but none have presented what happens if your estimate of the actual noise floor is wrong. I show with graphs the result of mis-measurement of the instruments noise floor.

#2 - Cross Correlation is a well known technique of using two instruments a a lot of vector averages to get a result that can be below a single instruments noise floor. In plain language I simplify the math involved so that even non-DSP engineers can understand the technique.
A sample project is provided in C# for experimentation.

Steve Hageman
www.AnalogHome.com