I have a pretty solid grasp of electronic theory but for some reason op amps are confusing the ever living *frick* out of me.
Edit:. Thanks to those of you trying to dumb it down for me! I have an electronics tech assessment with Garmin on Thursday, and though I’ve worked on electronics for 14 years, including 9 in the military, those 9 years were in the Marines. I understand things better when they’re sketched with crayons 🙂
In: Engineering
Internally, there’s a bunch of transistors that are arranged in a complicated way to give it properties that approximate the ideal op-amp. I don’t know about the internals.
I think the main point of the op-amp is the extremely high gain (amplifies the difference in voltage at input), which I think is useless without also using negative feedback.
The feedback forces the voltage at one of the inputs to be the same as the other, otherwise, the outputs are one of the rails (even an input difference of 0.01v will cause it to reach a 12v rail with typical op-amps)
Using the fact that the op-amp forces the input voltages to match allows us to pick clever circuits to get cool behaviour like:
– amplifying a signal
– signal buffering
– filtering
– oscillation
– transfer functions synthesis
—> brings control theory into reality
– more stuff
I think of it as a general purpose component. If you need a transfer function / amplifier of a particular gain, you can build it with whatever op-amp and some resistors and capacitors.
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