Voltage-feedback amplifiers (VFA) have been with us for about 60 years, and they have been problems for circuit designers since the first day. You see, the feedback that makes them versatile and accurate also has a tendency to make them unstable. The operational amplifier (op amp) circuit configuration uses a high-gain amplifier whose parameters are determined by external feedback components. The amplifier gain is so high that without these external feedback components, the slightest input signal would saturate the amplifier output. The op amp is in common usage, so this configuration is examined in detail, but the results are applicable to many other voltage-feedback circuits. Current-feedback amplifiers (CFA) are similar to VFAs, but the differences are important enough to warrant CFAs being handled separately.
Stability as used in electronic circuit terminology is often defined as achieving a nonoscillatory state. This is a poor, inaccurate definition of the word. Stability is a relative term, and this situation makes people uneasy because relative judgments are exhaustive. It is easy to draw the line between a circuit that oscillates and one that does not oscillate, so we can understand why some people believe that oscillation is a natural boundary between stability and instability.
Feedback circuits exhibit poor phase response, overshoot, and ringing long before oscillation occurs, and these effects are considered undesirable by circuit designers. This chapter is not concerned with oscillators; thus, relative stability is defined in terms of performance. By definition, when designers decide what tradeoffs are acceptable, they determine what the relative stability of the circuit is. A relative stability measurement is the damping ratio (ΞΆ) and the damping ratio is discussed in detail in Reference 1. The damping ratio is related to phase margin, hence phase margin is another measure of relative stability. The most stable circuits have the longest response times, lowest bandwidth, highest accuracy, and least overshoot. The least stable circuits have the fastest response times, highest bandwidth, lowest accuracy, and some overshoot.
Op Amps left in their native state oscillate without some form of compensation. The first IC op amps were very hard to stabilize, but there were a lot of good analog designers around in the ’60s, so we used them. Internally compensated op amps were introduced in the late ’60s in an attempt to make op amps easy for everyone to use. Unfortunately, internally compensated op amps sacrifice a lot of bandwidth and still oscillate under some conditions, so an understanding of compensation is required to apply op amps.
Internal compensation provides a worst-case trade-off between stability and performance. Uncompensated op amps require more attention, but they can do more work. Both are covered here.
Compensation is a process of applying a judicious patch in the form of an RC network to make up for a less than perfect op amp or circuit. There are many different problems that can introduce instability, thus there are many different compensation schemes.
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