A differential amplifier is a type of electronic amplifier that amplifies the difference between two input voltages but suppresses any voltage common to the two inputs. It is an analog circuit with two inputs and and one output , in which the output is ideally proportional to the difference between the two voltages:
where is the gain of the amplifier.
Single amplifiers are usually implemented by either adding the appropriate feedback resistors to a standard op-amp, or with a dedicated integrated circuit containing internal feedback resistors. It is also a common sub-component of larger integrated circuits handling analog signals.
Theory
The output of an ideal differential amplifier is given by
where and are the input voltages, and is the differential gain.
In practice, however, the gain is not quite equal for the two inputs. This means, for instance, that if and are equal, the output will not be zero, as it would be in the ideal case. A more realistic expression for the output of a differential amplifier thus includes a second term:
where is called the common-mode gain of the amplifier.
As differential amplifiers are often used to null out noise or bias voltages that appear at both inputs, a low common-mode gain is usually desired.
The common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR), usually defined as the ratio between differential-mode gain and common-mode gain, indicates the ability of the amplifier to accurately cancel voltages that are common to both inputs. The common-mode rejection ratio is defined as
In a perfectly symmetric differential amplifier, is zero, and the CMRR is infinite. Note that a differential amplifier is a more general form of amplifier than one with a single input; by grounding one input of a differential amplifier, a single-ended amplifier results.
Long-tailed pair
Historical background
Modern differential amplifiers are usually implemented with a basic two-transistor circuit called a “long-tailed” pair or differential pair. This circuit was originally implemented using a pair of vacuum tubes. The circuit works the same way for all three-terminal devices with current gain. The bias points of “long-tail” resistor circuit are largely determined by Ohm's law and less so by active-component characteristics.
The long-tailed pair was developed from earlier knowledge of push–pull circuit techniques and measurement bridges. An early circuit which closely resembles a long-tailed pair was published by British neurophysiologist Bryan Matthews in 1934, and it seems likely that this was intended to be a true long-tailed pair but was published with a drawing error. The earliest definite long-tailed pair circuit appears in a patent submitted by Alan Blumlein in 1936. By the end of the 1930s the topology was well established and had been described by various authors, including Frank Offner (1937), Otto Schmitt (1937) and Jan Friedrich Toennies (1938), and it was particularly used for detection and measurement of physiological impulses.
The long-tailed pair was very successfully used in early British computing, most notably the Pilot ACE model and descendants, Maurice Wilkes’ EDSAC, and probably others designed by people who worked with Blumlein or his peers. The long-tailed pair has many favorable attributes if used as a switch: largely immune to tube (transistor) variations (of great importance when machines contained 1,000 tubes or more), high gain, gain stability, high input impedance, medium/low output impedance, good clipper (with a not-too-long tail), non-inverting (EDSAC contained no inverters!) and large output voltage swings. One disadvantage is that the output voltage swing (typically ±10–20 V) was imposed upon a high DC voltage (200 V or so), requiring care in signal coupling, usually some form of wide-band DC coupling. Many computers of this time tried to avoid this problem by using only AC-coupled pulse logic, which made them very large and overly complex (ENIAC: 18,000 tubes for a 20-digit calculator) or unreliable. DC-coupled circuitry became the norm after the first generation of vacuum-tube computers.
Configurations
A differential (long-tailed, emitter-coupled) pair amplifier consists of two amplifying stages with common (emitter, source or cathode) degeneration.