Electronic – Operational Amplifier (UA741) clipping well under voltage rails asymmetrically EDIT: had same issue with different opamp

amplifiercircuit-designoperational-amplifiersignal processingvoltage-clipping

EDIT 2: I should point out we were having the exact same problem with a OPA2134PA.

EDIT: Problem persists up to +-30V and adding parallel resistors to the virtual ground capacitors did not help either.

Been trying to figure out what looks like a clipping issue in the linked circuit.

Our input is a 8kHZ 120mV sine voltage signal coming from an AD9850 we are trying to amplify it to a 5V signal. The signal is clipping at 1.3 V PtP well below our rails of +-5V.

We've upped the supply to 20V (+-10V) but the "clipping" remains (the clipped signal peak to peak slightly increases to 1.8ishV). We have a slightly uneven splitting for the supply voltage on the OpAmp at 5.5V and -4.5V at a 10 volt supply but from what I read that should not be causing that much of an issue?

The negative peak is clipped less than the positive peak. We are pretty sure our capacitors are oriented correctly (we have C1 + facing the positive side of the supply, C2+ facing the ground and the C3 positive facing the AC input.

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Best Answer

The big problem with the schematic as drawn is that your zero-volt reference is free to float anywhere between either supply rail. Try adding low-ish value resistors << 1k, if possible, across C1 and C2. This will hold the ground reference voltage a bit better.

If that improves things then consider either a split rail supply or replacing the lower resistor with a 5 V Zener diode to hold the zero-volt line at +5 V relative to the negative supply.

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Figure 1. Resistive and Zener ground generation.