Michael Walsh Dr.

Shibayev Advanced Lab 13 April 2010 Operational Amplifiers Lab (Part 1) The purpose of this laboratory was to construct some basic co-amp circuits: the inverting amplifier, the non-inverting amplifier, and the difference amplifier. Before getting into the details of the procedures for each part, it is important to give some properties of operational amplifiers, or op-amps. Operational amplifiers operate on high input impedance, low output impedance, wide frequency response (including DC), and two inputs, which operate in differential mode. The most interesting characteristic of the operational amplifier is the fact that it can give a gain in voltage. The open loop gain the ratio of the output voltage to the difference between the input voltages = ( ). of the amplifier is and : (1)

Two last details that must be mentioned are the following golden rules of circuit design using operational amplifiers. I. The output attempts to do whatever is necessary to make the voltage difference between the inputs zero. II. The input draws negligible current. Our first procedure consisted of constructing an inverting amplifier as shown in figure 3 in the manual. For our resistor values, we recorded = 1 and , 10 = 2.2 . We used supply , 100 , we obtained

voltages of +15 and 15 . Using frequencies of 1

corresponding input and output voltages of (1.64, 3.6), (1.6, 3.6), and (1.64, 3.6). These all gave

around the same gain of approximately 2-2.2. This follows very closely to the equation for gain given by the golden rules = (2)

By equation (2), with the values of the resistors previously given, the theoretical gain is approximately 2.2. We noted that the phase shift between input and output voltages were roughly 180 out of phase, as is expected with the inverted amplifier. Repeating the procedure with = 10 , we observed a much greater gain. The second procedure was similar to the first except this time we constructed the noninverting amplifier as shown in the manual (page 5). Again, values used for the resistors were = 1 and = 2.2 . For frequency of 1, 10, and 100 (kHz), we saw input and output

voltages of (1.1, 4), (1.22, 4), (1.22, 4), respectively. Thus, the calculated gain was roughly 3.3. These values are close to the ones predicted by the golden rules: = 1+ (6)

According to (6), the gain would be approximately 3.2. It is unnecessary to go into much detail describing what was observed in using increase values of . In principle, the larger becomes,

the greater the gain is. In this case of the non-inverting amplifier, the input and output voltages were in phase. Increasing the frequency had little or no effect in changing the gain. The final procedure was to construct the difference amplifier, as shown in the manual on page 6. The gain for this circuit is = ( ) (8)

Using resistor values of = +15

= 1 , and providing = 5.2 ,

=5

and = 9.8 .

, we obtained the following values:

= 15.2 ,

This value for output voltage agrees with that given by (8).