A Unified Explanation of gm/ID-Based Noise Analysis

We present an unified explanation of the transconductance-to-drain current (gm/ID)-based noise analysis in this paper. We show that both thermal noise coefficient (γ) and device noise corner frequency (fco) are dependent on the gm/ID of a transistor. We derive expressions to demonstrate the relationship between the normalized noise power spectral density technique and the technique based on γ and fco. We conclude this letter with examples to demonstrate the practical implication of our study. Our results show that while both techniques discussed in this letter can be used to compute noise numerically, using γ and fco to separate thermal noise from flicker noise provides additional insight for optimizing noise.