Measurement results of low-frequency noise behaviour, and in particular, the noise correlations in lateral pnp bipolar transistors are presented for various bias conditions in both forward active and saturation regimes. The correlation in output collector noise is very high with a value close to unity only when the device is in medium injection. At extremely high injection, the degree of coherence degrades, depicting a behaviour similar to the forward current gain of the device. This degradation can be attributed to emitter-crowding effects. The correlation in output noise can be exploited to drastically suppress the intrinsic noise, particularly at low frequencies, making such devices useful for the input stage of amplifiers; the first step towards realisation of ultra low-noise amplifiers in standard integrated circuit technology.
Differential ultra low noise amplifier for low frequency noise measurements