Electronic – Reducing noise on a voltage reference

current-sinkcurrent-sourcenoisevoltage-reference

I need a stable, low noise voltage reference that I can adjust between 1.4V and 1.8V. The output should source or sink up to 0.25mA @150Hz max. The output will provide a +1.65V bias for a bipolar signal driven by another op amp into the ADC on a microcontroller. (I need some adjustability because the bipolar signal has got some d.c. offset error I want to null out).

A similar question was posted here Are all voltage reference ICs able to sink as well as source current?
and I wanted to develop that with a proposed design (below).

My question is: where would I put a capacitor to decouple noise in the reference? Could I assume a 100nF between the 2.5V reference diode's anode and cathode would suffice or would I ned further filtering on the input?

(By the way, I'm changing from the TLE2141 to a TL071AN in my circuit because the TLE2141 has too large a supply current.)

Buffered voltage reference

Best Answer

Most of the noise (perhaps 1-2mVp-p) will be due to the reference, so putting a capacitor on the op-amp non-inverting input (with a series resistor in the case of the TL071) makes some sense. 100nF with a 20K series resistor (about 22-23K equivalent total) will give you a cutoff frequency of around 71Hz if I did the math right. Similar to @WhatRoughBeast's comment but with added series resistance.

On the other hand if you use a lower noise reference such as an LM4040-2.048 or -2.5 which has something like 250uVp-p noise typically, the capacitor and resistor may not be necessary, since the amplifier is contributing significantly.