High input impedance amplifier

Abstract

High input impedance amplifiers are provided which reduce the input impedance solely to a capacitive reactance, or, in a somewhat more complex design, provide an extremely high essentially infinite, capacitive reactance. In one embodiment, where the input impedance is reduced in essence, to solely a capacitive reactance, an operational amplifier in a follower configuration is driven at its non-inverting input and a resistor with a predetermined magnitude is connected between the inverting and non-inverting inputs. A second embodiment eliminates the capacitance from the input by adding a second stage to the first embodiment. The second stage is a second operational amplifier in a non-inverting gain-stage configuration where the output of the first follower stage drives the non-inverting input of the second stage and the output of the second stage is fed back to the non-inverting input of the first stage through a capacitor of a predetermined magnitude. These amplifiers, while generally useful, are very useful as sensor buffer amplifiers that may eliminate significant sources of error.