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Noise Description
In the real world when we deal with measurement instrumentation and signal acquisition we must
consider noise, unless to build wrong systems or acquire wrong data. Indeed, noise limits the
instrument resolution, therefore turns out to be fundamental to deeply understand what’s noise, it’s
generation mechanisms and, first of all, its mathematical description. Hence this chapter describes
mathematical noise aspects, in order to provide all the necessary tools to properly manage it.

3.1 Introduction
In general, we can schematize a measurement system as a chain of blocks, each one
representing a particular operation or a particular device. In figure 3.1 we can see a
typical set-up for sensor measurements, in which four main blocks are sketched: the
sensor, the preamplifier, a filtering section and finally a meter. A sensor transduces
physical variables in electrical signals following a specific mathematical law that
links the variable to be measured to the electric signal generated at its output.
Typically, we want this relation to be linear, in order to easier and directly obtain
the physical quantity from the reading of the electrical signal, just multiplying it by
a transduction factor. After the signal generation, by means of a sensor, an
amplification action is needed in order to increase the signal level by just the
quantity needed to better perform subsequent processing, therefore the second block

Figure 3.1 Diagram of a typical set-up for sensor measurement.

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is a preamplifier, that in some cases may be also the sensor front-end. As underlined
in the Fig. 3.1, at the preamplifier output we have a significant noise level
superimposed on the signal, due to sensor intrinsic noise and also to noise
limitations of the gain stage. This explains why, after the preamplifier we typically
find a filtering block, which shapes noise and signal to obtain, at its output, the better
SNR achievable. Finally, after the filtering section, the fourth block is constituted
by meter circuits. For what concerns the noise of the two last blocks, hopefully their
noise can be neglected in a well-designed system, while, as stated before, we must
pay attention to noise coming out from the first two blocks.
After these practical considerations we can more easily understand noise effects on
a measurement and we can also try to get some qualitative definitions: noise can be
described like random disturbances superimposed upon a useful signal that tend to
obscure its information content, thus degrading the quality of the signal. These
unwanted fluctuations are generated randomly within the devices themselves and
they may limit the resolution of a detector, if they are large compared to signal
fluctuations. Therefore, in a measurement system it’s fundamental to reduce the
noise impact because it may limit the resolution.
In conclusion, we can summarize this introductive discussion stating that acquiring
signals means to recover information from noise. This better underlines why it’s so
important to properly handle noise in order to perform a correct measurement.