Noise Cancellation Techniques
Chapter 4
Noise Cancellation Techniques
Introduction
As with any other real world implementation of an experiment comes the ever ubiquitous noise which completely undermines nearly everything one originally plans in the design stages; our experiment was no exception. It could, in fact, be stated that noise, which by definition is any unwanted signal in your electronics, was the number one issue plaguing this experiment from our original designs through completion.
By its very nature, this project specifically contains several key issues that defy common noise-cancellation techniques. What these issues are along with a brief synopsis of the common noise-cancellation techniques will be discussed. Several noise cancellation techniques were utilized in this experiment and because of their profound consequences warrant their own chapter: the first of these is the build-in radiation protection of the VFAT2, charge-discriminating ICs, namely the Single Event Upset (SEU) triplicated logic and the Scan Chain ability for detecting erroneous digital gates; secondly, and also built into the VFAT2 controllers, are several differential-type signals that extend beyond the VFAT Breakout Board that the ISU LDS team designed; thirdly, the VFAT Breakout Board itself employs several noise cancellation techniques in its design and layout, many of which seem to defy common sense; in a similar vein are the shielding and grounding techniques applied to the experiment as a whole along with their respective pitfalls and explanations; lastly are the design and implementation of S-Curves for setting the appropriate threshold levels of the VFATs to mitigate spurious signals even after all of the aforementioned noise-cancellation techniques are utilized