Engineering division

Department of Electrical and Electronics engineering

Electronic I IEN 4020. Lecturer: Luis torres, Alejandro Espinal

Lab 1: Operational Amplifiers and Diodes

Group 1: Yiseth Kamell, Robert Martinez, Marcela Matos, Alberto Mercado
{ykamell, rdmarenco, lasprillam, mercadoea}@uninorte.edu.co
September 15, 2020

Abstract ing more than one stages make the amplifier in

general increase the overall voltage gain, in this
This report presents the design and implemen- laboratory, the signal that comes from the mi-
tation of an operational amplifier, which makes crophone to the speaker. Two terms come in the
an arithmetic operation given by the lecturer, way when analyzing the stages of an amplifier.
in addition to this, several wave-rectifiers were The amplifier needs transistors in order to work
connected to its output, with the purpose of ob- as needed. It could use a BJT or a MOSFET
serving the differences between them. transistors. A bipolar junction transistor is an
electronic device that lets the current increase
and the voltage decrease, and also controls the
1 Introduction flow of currents in his terminals. It is called bipo-
lar because it uses two junctions between two
Communication has become one of the most im-
semiconductors types, n/p type, it can be found
portant things when it comes to human social-
two types of bipolar junction transistors, PNP or
ization. It can be studied in many aspects of life,
NPN. The first one uses a n-doped region that
allowing different careers to step in. In Electron-
means that is doped with impurities that pro-
ics, it can go from deliver a message via internet
vide mobile electrons and the second one uses a
or do in it in real life. Because of the common
p-doped region that means is doped impurities
thought that electronics only involves phones,
that provide holes that readily accept electrons;
computers, smart things, is often forgotten the
A metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transis-
fact that it could help in human interactions face
tor is used to amplify or commute electronic sig-
to face. A speaker could help someone to com-
nals. It has four terminals: source, drain, gate
municate properly with thousands of people at
and bulk. There are two types of MOSFETs, the
the same time, to raise our voice. Hence, the
nmos type that uses a substratum type p with a
importance of this laboratory, which purpose is
n channel or the pmos type that uses a substra-
to design a capacitively coupled amplifier that
tum type n with a p channel. In this laboratory
amplifies the signal from a microphone and de-
will be shown how to get a certain voltage using
livers it to a speaker. This laboratory requires
a single transistor and how to amplify a signal
the knowledge of what an amplifier is and what
of a microphone so that a person 5 meters away
a capacitively coupled amplifier can do: An am-
could hear it. It will also show the process, the
plifier is an electronic circuit that allows to in-
mistakes made along the way, suggestions but
crease current, voltage or even power of an in-
mostly that it is possible to build an amplifier
put signal, delivering the a much higher signal
from scratch without being a professional.
in the output. Two amplifiers can be connected
in a way that the output of one drives the in-
put of the next one. That is made in stages,
arrangements made taking a cascade form. Hav-

1
2 Procedure After these aesthetic and technical decisions for
the assembly and simulations, we obtained both
As we mentioned before, the main purpose of the simulated circuit as seen in Fig. 2 and the
this practice was to design and build a circuit final protoboard assembly observed in Fig. 3
able to execute a specific arithmetic operation,
this being vo = 16v2 −4v1 , being v1 a DC voltage
that goes from -1 to 1 V, and v2 a sinusoidal wave
of 500 mV amplitude and 1kHz frequency. In
order to generate v2 , we used the 4040B function
generator. To generate v1 we used the PL-3003T
Power Supply, which was also used to power the
OpAmps. Figure 2: Complete circuit.
For the purpose of building said circuit, we
found that we required a non-inverting ampli-
fier and a difference amplifier. The non-inverting
one was used to amplify v2 , connecting its out-
put to the non-inverting input of the difference
one.
Prior to starting the assembly of the circuit,
we made some decisions that proved to be very
helpful at the end of the day. Those being, buy-
ing an integrated circuit that had four OpAmps
in it, and using two protoboards.
To assemble the circuit we used a quadruple
OpAmp (LM324N), which has the four internal
OpAmps distribuited as shown in Fig. 1. The
implementation of this amplifier was due to aes- Figure 3: Final circuit.
thetic reasons, because with the employment of
only one amplifier we had more space to orga- From this assembly we can corroborate the
nize the rest of the elements used in the circuit. perfect performance of the requested arithmetic
For the same reason, we used two protoboards, operation as observed in its theoretical value Fig.
on one of them we made all the montage of the 4 and its experimentally measured value Fig. 5
components connected directly to the OpAmp
and, on the other one, we set the rectifier bridge
and the potentiometer.

Figure 4: Output voltage.

The next step was the rectification of the pre-

vious output obtained through the use of a diode
and a super diode. In the case of the Diode we
carry out the following assembly.
Figure 1: Schematics of the LM324N integrated We can observe and make comparisons in the
circuit. values obtained in the diode in Fig. 7 where we

2
 Figure 5: Measured output voltage. Figure 9: Superdiode.

of the superdiode and its half-wave rectification,

we can see the relationship between the simu-
lation Fig. 10 and the data obtained through
the measurement Fig. 11, and we can also
make small comparisons between what was ob-
Figure 6: Diode. tained by a conventional half-wave rectification
and a half-wave rectification by means of a super
can observe the simulated behavior of the recti- diode.
fied half wave and in Fig. 8 its measured value
using the oscilloscope.

Figure 10: Half-wave rectifier (simulated) - Su-

per diode.
Figure 7: Half-wave rectifier (simulated) - Diode.

Figure 11: Half-wave rectifier (measured) - Su-

Figure 8: Half-wave rectifier (measured) - Diode. per diode.

For the Superdiode we carry out the following

assembly with which it is expected to reduce the
loss of 0.7 v due to the diode with an amplifier. On the other hand, for the last stage of our
If we look at the expected behaviors in the case laboratory in which we were asked to perform a

3
full wave rectification to the result of our arith- 3 Results Analysis
metic operation, we paid attention to the assem-
bly of a rectifier bridge which allows us to per- The results we’ve got in the laboratory were not
form a full wave reaction which can be read on far from what we had in the simulation. We
the resistor seen in Fig. 12. measured the output of each stage, both in the
laboratory and simulation.
The differences we can most notice are in the
super diode and the full wave bridge rectifier out-
put, where you can find small disturbances in
the signal that may be caused by the protoboard
connections, the sources connections, diodes or
any problem with the wires themselves. Also we
were not getting an output from the potentiome-
Figure 12: Rectifier bridge. ter of 1 and -1 as we did in the simulation, but
0.9 and -1.2 which could actually represent the
slightly different values received in the labora-
From this full wave rectification the following tory
wave behavior is obtained for a specific value of
voltage in the potentiometer Voltage (v) Measured Expected
Output (vo) 18 18
Diode 7.28 7.34
Superdiode 7.52 8
Bridge rectifier. 5.8 6.7

Table 1: Results table

The results mentioned above are shown on the

Figure 13: Full-wave rectifier (simulated)
Table 1: Results table, where we can see that
the output measured and the expected output
are the same, with no disturbances. In the other
results, we can see very minimal differences in
the diode with 7.28 measured and 7.34 expected,
super diode (7.52-8.00) and full wave bridge rec-
tifier (5.8-6.7).
The procedure was followed strictly, with the
right safety measures, obtaining the desired re-
sults.

Figure 14: Full-wave bridge rectifier (measured).

4 Conclusions
At the end of the laboratory, we were able to
relate the theory with the correct manipulation
of the electronic components seen in class, such
as OpAmps and diodes. In this order of ideas,
we also understood some of their uses, for ex-
ample, rectifiers and the operations that can be
performed by amplifiers.

4
 On the other hand, we could learn how to use
the LTspice Software. Furthermore, we also ac-
quired the ability to make the physical montage
of the circuit previously made in LTspice, get-
ting to know that it is important to consider the
color code when assembling a circuit.
Additionally, it was necessary to keep in mind
the safety regulations, which means, we needed
to wear gloves and glasses when measuring the
flows and signals of the circuit.
To sum up, all the expectations on this project
were successfully accomplished and almost ev-
erything worked out as expected.
References
[1] A. S. Sedra, K. C. Smith. Microelectronic
Circuits, 7th ed. Oxford University Press,
2014.