Instrumentation for noise measurements on CMOS transistors for fast detector preamplifiers

High-density high-speed CMOS and BiCMOS technologies are today widely used for the design of readout integrated circuits for room-temperature X- and gamma-ray imaging detectors. This paper describes a laboratory instrument that was developed to characterize the noise performances of CMOS devices to be used for high-speed analog signal processing. This instrument extends the noise-measuring capabilities beyond 100 MHz to detect the white noise component beyond the 1/f noise corner frequency, which in shorter channel devices shifts to higher values as compared to long-channel transistors.