Reply to 'Comment on "Comparison of excess 1/f noise spectra in trimmed and untrimmed thick film resistors''

Mercha et al. (2001) make valuable comments that provide a quantitative cla rification to the experimental results reported by us (Peled et al. 2000). There are essentially two aspects to the latter paper. First is the purely experimental results that consist of 1/f spectra, and the dependence of the noise spectral density on the volume and resistance for untrimmed and trim med thick film resistors (TFRs). The second aspect is the difficult interpr etation of the data. The experimental data clearly show that the spectral n oise density is higher in trimmed than in untrimmed TFRs. Further, the expe riments show that although the current spectral noise density S-i scales wi th the reciprocal volume for untrimmed TFRs, it does not do so for the trim med TFRs. It is true that in non-homogeneous samples one should use the Van damme-modified Hooge expression in equation (7) of Mercha et al. (2001).