Sunday, January 26, 2014

On Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)

A large part of circuit design is about making trade-offs between speed, cost, power consumption and so on while meeting some design specification that can often be traced to Signal to Noise ratio (SNR). Yet, possibly for pedagogical reasons, SNR is often under-emphasized in undergraduate classes. Remember those amplifiers you heard/read about years ago ? This post will demonstrate a canonical application of amplifiers and show you how to measure SNR of a signal captured from an Arduino.