FPGA based system for the generation of noise with programmable power spectrum

Noise sources are needed for test and validation of noise sensitive electronic systems but only wide band white noise sources are directly available on the market. In this paper a programmable colored noise generator is proposed. The system allows to configure the spectral features of the noise and is implemented with a Field Programmable Gate Array that produces the digital samples of the noise and a Digital to Analog Converter that produces the analogue output. The proposed generator overcomes the state of the art in terms of bandwidth and flexibility and produces a noise sequence whose length is unlimited for practical purposes. Experimental results show that the bandwidth of the generated noise can be selected up to a maximum of 120 MHz while defining the power spectral density with a frequency resolution equal to 0.2 % of the selected bandwidth.