Concept

Guarding — where it appears

A conductor around a high-impedance input, driven to the input's own potential so that the leakage across the board has no voltage across it. It multiplies the input resistance by the amplifier's loop gain, and it leaves behind whatever the copy of the input fails to be.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A clean board is 14.0 mV of error, and a guard makes it 1.0 nV. computed by solving, not by drawing. Two boards differing by one wire, solved with the leakage present and again with it removed, so the number plotted is the leakage's own contribution and nothing else. Unguarded, a teraohm across the laminate from a 15 V rail through a 1 GΩ source is 13.99 millivolts — and a humid morning takes that resistance down two decades, which is the left-hand end of this axis. Guarded, the ring is held at the input's own potential by the amplifier, so what is across the leakage is the amplifier's own error and the result is 1.00 nanovolts. The guarded line is flat in the rail and proportional to the signal: the offset has become a gain error of 1.00 parts per billion, and the reading is low by it rather than high: the ring sits a little below the input, so the last of the leakage pulls the input down.

The current that does not reach the input

A teraohm across a board from a fifteen-volt rail is fourteen millivolts of error through a gigohm source, and a humid morning takes that resistance down two decades. A ring held at the input's own potential leaves a nanovolt — proportional to the signal rather than to the rail, so an offset has become a gain error of one part in a billion — and the same wire multiplies the input resistance by the loop gain, which makes it 10¹⁸ Ω at direct current and 10¹² Ω at a megahertz.

instruments · Guarding

The guard leaves a negative resistance, and it reaches −1.59 kΩ. computed by solving, not by drawing. The magnitude of the conductance a source sees looking into the input, guarded and not, with 100 pF of cable and a 1.00 MHz amplifier. The unguarded input's conductance is positive everywhere — a capacitance to ground and a leakage to a rail are both losses. The guarded one is negative above 0.0404 Hz, and its magnitude rises as the square of frequency: −15.9 MΩ at 10 kHz, −161 kΩ at 100 kHz, −3.18 kΩ at a megahertz. Above the amplifier's gain-bandwidth product it flattens at ωₜ·C, which is −1.59 kΩ. That is the same input the guard raises to 10¹⁸ Ω at direct current, and nothing about the leakage the guard was installed for appears in it: the negative resistance is a product of the amplifier's bandwidth and the cable it is driving.

The sign of what the guard gives back

A guard ring is sold on two numbers and they are both about magnitudes: a teraohm of leakage multiplied to 10¹⁸ ohms, and a hundred picofarads of cable bootstrapped out of the way. The guard is also driving that capacitance with a copy of the input that lags it, and a capacitance driven by a lagging copy of its own voltage takes current out of phase with the voltage across it. What the guarded input presents is a negative conductance rising as the square of frequency — −15.9 megohms at ten kilohertz, −3.18 kilohms at a megahertz, flattening at the gain-bandwidth product times the capacitance — and a faster amplifier makes it worse.

instruments · Guarding

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Bootstrapping Input impedance Loop gain Source impedance Input bias current Leakage current Measurement error Model range Negative resistance Verification

All concepts