Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Op Amp Stability

It turns out that the output voltage of one of the op amps that we are using for our fixed voltage source will ring when the load is placed across it using the analog mux. The other op amp truly produces a fixed voltage using a unity gain follower and does not respond to the addition of a load, but the one that has the problem is the one that's supposed to adjust its output to produce the fixed voltage on the other side of a current sense resistor. Searching for ways of improving stability, both I and my coworker initially focused on the usual method of adding damping to the feedback loop with first a resistor and then an RC network. Here are some links that discuss this method. Most of them focus on doing simple frequency analysis that I haven't been able to do for decades and should really refamiliarize myself with.

http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an148fa.pdf

http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/technical/document/application_note/CD00176008.pdf

Eventually, I found a couple of forum threads where a guy had a circuit sort of similar to ours, where he was trying to turn on a MOSFET with an op amp and his circuit's step response showed ringing identical to ours. He felt his way to a different looking solution which turned out to be the one that worked great for me, which was putting a capacitor between the output of the op amp and the negative side of the feedback loop. Actually, this seems topologically very similar to having the cap in parallel with the feedback resistor, it merely also includes the sense resistor (or in this person's case the MOSFET Gate-Drain resistance) which is to say the entire feedback loop. In this person's case, he was more interested in understanding why his SPICE model hadn't caught the problem. Anyhow, this feedback topology is actually covered in the above tutorials as the "in the loop" compensation method, and the presence of inline resistance before the feedback is also discussed as a prime cause of instability, so it turns out that all of the sources that I found are actually in agreement.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/175652/how-to-test-op-amp-stability/175656

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/176669/why-doesnt-ltspice-predict-this-op-amp-oscillation/176696