Refined procedure for optimising signal-to-noise ratio in cascade active-RC filters

Traditional methods for optimising the dynamic range of cascade filters can lead to erroneous results because section noise is neglected and section gain assignment is treated as independent from pole-zero pairing and ordering. Using backtrack programming, this paper outlines an efficient method that avoids these problems. The effect of internal noise sources is included and all section parameters leading to an optimised cascade filter are determined simultaneously.