What Is All This Error Budget Stuff Anyway

C H APTER 16
What’s All This Error Budget

Stuff, Anyhow?
Robert A. Pease
Well, I stated at the start of the story the reason it ’s important to do an error budget on even
a simple circuit—and then I showed the size of trouble you can get into if you don’t. I rest my
case. /rap
I was just on the phone explaining to a young engineer how to do an error budget analysis
on some fairly simple circuits. Later, I mentioned this while I was visiting my friend
Martin, and he said he had been quite surprised when he found that many engineers in
Europe were quite unfamiliar with the concept of an error budget. How can you design a
good circuit without being aware of which components will hurt your accuracy?
When I was a kid engineer back in 1962, my boss George Philbrick gave me a book
on differential amplifiers by Dr. R. David Middlebrook, and he asked me to do a book
review. I studied the book, and it was full of hundreds of partial differential equations. If
you wanted the output of a circuit with fourteen components, you could see a complete
analysis of how each component would affect the output offset and gain. Each equation
filled up a whole page. It did this several times.
Yet the book didn’t offer any insights into what’s important. I mean, is d(R1) more
important than R1 d( )? In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t submit any critique of that
book. I would’ve done more harm than good. Such a mess! Even now, it would be hard to
write a critique on a book that was so true but so unhelpful.
Things are much simpler now that people are mostly (but not entirely) designing with op-
amps. The best thing is that the output offset and DC gain and AC gain errors are largely
orthogonal. An “operational” amplifier does perform, largely, an “operation” based on
what task you ask it to perform when you “program it” with Rs and Cs. If the offset
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380 Chapter 16
Figure 16-1: Conventional differential amplifi er.
varies, the gain does not, and vice versa. We all agree that it’s very helpful that you can
compute what the performance will be with almost no interaction. No partial derivatives.
Now let’s take a look at a couple of applications—real circuits—and their tolerances
within an error budget. Here is an amplifier to magnify the I R drop of current through
a 0.1- resistor and bring it back down to ground. Figure 16-1 shows a conventional
differential amplifier, with the common mode up at 12 V. The gain of 20 will bring
the 1.0 A 0.1 signal down to a ground level. If the current is 0.1 A, the output will be
0.2 V, small scale. A full-scale current of 1 A will bring the output up to 2.0 V, which is
suitable to send to a detector or analog-to-digital converter.
Let’s select an op-amp like the LMC6482A, with low offset voltage less than 1.0 mV.
(There are other versions of this amplifier with less than 0.35 mV, but let’s select an
intermediate model.) This 1 mV does cause 21 mV of output error. This op-amp has less
than 20 pA of IB at all temperatures, so at least that ’s negligible. (Bipolar op-amps might
have small IB errors, but you’d have to check it.)
Now let’s see what the resistors add. Assuming that all Rs have a 1% tolerance, the gain
of (2.0 V per A) has a tolerance of 3%. This would cause 60 mV at full scale, but only
6 mV at small scale (0.1 A). This might be acceptable.
Then let’s consider the common-mode errors. If R4 has a 1% tolerance and it has 11.4 V
across it, the 1% tolerance could cause a 114-mV error. By symmetry, a 1% error of each
of R1, R2, R3 can cause another 114 mV! Added together, the common mode could cause
an output error of 456 mV! That’s about 1/4 of full scale—even for small signals. That
doesn’t look so good to me!
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What’s All This Error Budget Stuff, Anyhow? 381
Figure 16-2: Alternative circuit.
It’s true that if adjacent 1-k resistors are inserted, they’re likely to match within 1/2%,
so the probable error between the pair might cause 60 mV and the 1/2% matching
between the 20 k would cause another 60 mV. That added to the 21 mV from the VOS
would add to 141 mV.
Some textbooks teach you that you should add these errors arithmetically to 141 mV. Others
point out that they could be added in an RMS way, so that 60 60 21 mV 87 mV.
Typically, this might be true. But the worst case of 141 or 456 mV might be more realistic. I
mean, if you’re going to build 1000 circuits and most of them are better than 141 mV, what
are you going to do with the 400 circuits that are worse than 141 mV? And that’s still 7% of
full scale.…
You could go shopping for 0.1% resistors, but they aren’t cheap. You could put in a
trimpot to trim the error (to no offset error) for small signals. But as you might have
noticed, a trimpot has to be properly trimmed. And if that pot is accessible, it could
someday be mistrimmed and it would have to be corrected in some awkward calibration
cycle. Most people want to avoid that trimpot. Before we decide that this 141 mV is
unacceptable, let ’s look at another circuit.
Figure 16-2 shows an alternative circuit with the same gain, 2.0 V per A, using a PN4250
or 2N4250, a high-beta pnp transistor. What does the error budget look like? The same
op-amp causes just 20 mV of output error. The 1% resistor tolerances cause the same
gain error, 60 mV at full scale, or 6 mV at small scale. The newly added transistor adds
(?1/3%) max from its alpha, or less than 7 mV, at full scale.
What is the offset error due to common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) or due to resistor
mismatch? Nothing. Zero. The transistor doesn’t care about the voltage across it. There
are no resistors with 12 V across them.
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382 Chapter 16
So the offset error is 20 mV, due primarily to the amplifier’s VOS (which could be
reduced), not 400 mV. This little circuit has greatly reduced errors compared to
Figure 16-1, even if Figure 16-1 had a couple bucks of 0.1% resistors. This might be
acceptable. Even the offset errors could be reduced to 7 mV by selecting the LMV841
or LMC7701.
So we have seen that circuits with similar functions can have completely different error
budgets. I love to recommend amplifiers with high CMRR. But depending on cheap 1%
resistors can hurt your error budget a lot more than you’d suspect.
This article was first printed in Electronic Design Magazine, June 8, 2006, and is
reprinted with the kind permission of Penton Publishing.
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C H APTER 16

What’s All This Error Budget

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Figure 16-1: Conventional differential ampliﬁ er.

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Figure 16-2: Alternative circuit.

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