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Introduction

Why are there so many op amps to choose from? One answer is that many parts are a legacy from the past. Even though newer and better parts have been designed, the old parts will still be listed and sold because they are "designed in." The process of finding the right op amp is a process of examining the various op amp parameters.

First of all you have to decide what is important. For high precision, if you are not doing a system calibration to remove errors, it is important that the op amp has a very low offset voltage and offset voltage drift. If high speed is important then we may have to accept higher supply currents. A special group of op amps known as instrumentation amplifiers provides the functionality that can only be achieved using a combination of precision resistors and precision op amps. Other critical factors might be noise, supply voltages, input and output voltage range, slew rate, supply current, etc. No single op amp will be the best in all these areas because optimizing one parameter may compromise another.

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