Electronic Products Word of the Week: Op Amp

An op amp, or operational amplifier is, to quote Tamara Schmitz of Intersil, “the main building block of analog systems.” The list of these systems is long, including filters, rectifiers, detectors, calculators, and converters both from and to the digital world (the world of zeros and ones) from the analog world, where we live.

Fig. 1: The common input and output pins of an op amp, what Tamara Scmitz calls “this magical triangle.”

I can't explain an op amp any better than Tamara Schmitz did in her 2011 Electronic Products article, “Op amps 101“:

“They can provide gain, buffering, filtering, mixing and multiple mathematic functions. In system diagrams, they are represented by a triangle with five connections: positive supply, negative supply, positive input, negative input and output (see Fig. 1 ). “