The design and optimization of electronic systems often requires appraisal an of the electrical noise generated by active devices, and, at a technological level, the ability to properly design active elements in order to minimize, when possible, their noise. Examples of critical applications are, of course, receiver front-ends in RF and optoelectronic transmission systems, but also front-end stages in sensors and, in a completely different context, nonlinear circuits such as oscillators, mixers, and frequency multipliers. The rapid de- velopment of silicon RF applications has recently...