Over-the-Air Noise Figure Measurement in a Reverberation Chamber for Low-Noise Devices

Measuring the noise figure (NF) of highly-integrated wireless devices can be a challenging task. This paper shows that the reverberation-chamber-noise-figure (RCN) method can be used to determine this characteristic of a device with an NF below 4 dB at sub-GHz frequencies. This is a significantly lower NF and operating frequency as compared to the device used for the original RCN method. The lower NF is measured using the simplified RCN method, which has an improved uncertainty over the original RCN method. To accommodate for the operating frequency below 1 GHz, a larger reverberation chamber is used. An uncertainty analysis shows that the NF could be estimated within 0.52 dB uncertainty and the gain within 0.91 dB.