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freax
modified 11 years ago

A question...

1
6
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00:51:35
Is there any difference regarding these two circuits, other than the way op-amps are plugged?
published 11 years ago
ETJAKEOC
11 years ago
Answer, slap a resistor across the green and blue and see if it draws any power ;)
freax
11 years ago
It draws a few uA, Is it safe to say it has no difference? How about real life op-amps?
stanislav_maslovski
11 years ago
freax, you just found a bug in the simulator. The circuits are not the same: the bottom one has positive feedback and is unstable. In practice, it will behave as a bistable trigger circuit, switching between -15 and +15 V at the output when the input voltage changes approximately between -1.5 ... +1.5 V.
freax
11 years ago
thanks for your answer! :D
hurz
11 years ago
@stanislav_maslovski, you are right, the lower one is a nonlinear circuit and it will behave like a schmitt trigger. However, its not a simulator bug. This is also happening in a real environment! It depends only on power on transition if it turns directly into a schmitt trigger or behave linear.
stanislav_maslovski
11 years ago
hurz, in real life the bottom circuit will not be able to maintain the equilibrium state (because this state is unstable!), and will switch to +15 or to -15 V at the output, even without any input voltage applied, just due to noise and/or asymmetry in the opamp schematic. To understand why this will happen, imagine for a moment that the initial output voltage is not zero, but, let us say +1 uV. Then, in the bottom circuit about +0.1 uV will appear at the non-inverting input. This will be amplified by 100K times to +10 mV at the output, and so on, until the output reaches saturation at +15 V.

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