An opamp as a tool for testing

A measurement technique is presented to test operational amplifiers and derive their small-signal parameters from AC measurements. This procedure is very powerful for characterizing, testing, and debugging operational amplifiers. The procedure has been applied to a standard CMOS Miller-compensated amplifier. It is shown that the simulation results, obtained from SPICE, can considerably differ from the measured data. When this information is fed back to synthesis programs, more reliable designs, which follow the simulated behavior more closely, can result.<
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