2
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without notice. No patent rights or licenses to any of the circuits described herein are implied or granted to any third party. BURR-BROWN does not authorize or warrant
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In the clamping mode, when the voltage across the two
zeners reaches
±
(V
Z
+ V
F
), the circuit goes from acting as a
voltage amplifier to acting as a voltage reference; the volt-
age across R
is fixed and the potentiometer output is
±
x(V
Z
+V
F
). Further increase in the magnitude of the signal at E
I
can’t change this potentiometer value until it drops below
the limit point V
L
.
Thus, clamping is no longer limited to the fixed levels of
available zener voltages. Even clamping levels as low as
5mV become practical when offset-trimmable OPA111 op
amps replace the OPA2111. However, available zener volt-
ages and the closed-loop gain of A
2
set the maximum
clamping level.
Use of 10 –V zeners and a gain of one for A
can cover the
voltage range of most analog-signal processing. Unfortu-
nately, the voltage temperature coefficients of 10 –V zeners
would produce thermal drift in the clamping level. With 5.6
–V zeners, however, the temperature coefficients of the
zener and forward voltages tend to cancel. For such zener
diodes V
+ V
= 6.2V, and the net drift is near zero. Then,
with A
2
set to a gain of 1.77, the maximum limit voltage V
L
is 11V.
The 5% tolerances of the zener voltages determine the basic
accuracy of the clamp levels. The gain-setting resistors R
2
and R
impose additional tolerance error. However, adjust-
ing the gain with these resistors can compensate for any
zener-voltage error and resistor tolerances. With matched
zeners, the adjustment can readily reduce the clamp-level
errors to less than 1%. Without matching, the 5% error of
simple zener clamping prevails, but the circuit still clamps
sharply.
For frequency stability, resistor R
and capacitor C supply a
frequency roll-off in A
. At high frequencies, the capacitor
shorts the output of A
to its inverting input. Then A
and A
2
operate with independent feedback loops, and the overall
circuit requires stability in the individual amplifiers.