Page 22 - Op Amps Design, Applications, and Troubleshooting

Review of Important Basic Concepts 5

Fields of Application. Op amps find use in such diverse fields as medical
electronics, industrial electronics, agriculture, test equipment, consumer products,
and automotive products. It has become a basic building block for analog systems
and for the analog portion of digital systems.

1.2 REVIEW OF IMPORTANT BASIC CONCEPTS

Throughout my career in the electronics field, I have known certain individuals
whose observable skills in circuit analysis far exceeded most others with similar
levels of education and experience. These people all have one definite thing in
common: They have an unusually strong mastery of basic—really bask—
electronics. And they have the ability to look at a complex, unfamiliar circuit and see
a combination of simple circuits that can be analyzed with such tools as Ohm's and
Kirchhoff's Laws. We will strive to develop these two skills as we progress through
the text.
This portion of the text provides a condensed review of several important
laws and theorems that are used to analyze electronic circuits. A mastery of these
basic ideas will greatly assist you in understanding and analyzing the operation of
the circuits presented in the remainder of the text and encountered in industry.

1.2.1 Ohm's Law
The basic forms of Ohm's Law are probably known to everyone who is even
slightly trained in electronics. The three forms are

where V (or E) represents the applied voltage (volts), R represents the resistance of
the circuit (ohms), and / represents the current flow (amperes). Your concept of
Ohm's Law, however, should extend beyond the arithmetic operations required to
solve a problem. You need to develop an intuitive feel for the circuit behavior. For
example, without the use of mathematics, you should know that if the applied
voltage to a particular circuit is increased while the resistance remains the same,
then the value of current in the circuit will also increase proportionately. Similarly,
without mathematics, it needs to be obvious to you that an increased current flow