# Why is my negative peak detector behaving poorly?

Background

I have an amplitude detector circuit which consists of positive and negative peak detectors fed into an instrumentation amplifier.

The purpose of the circuit is to output the amplitude of an AC square wave. The reason I have both positive and negative peak detectors is because the square wave is not symmetrical about 0V. There may be up to a 200 mV offset for a 12V peak-to-peak square wave. If I had an input that was known to be symmetrical, I would just measure the positive peak and double it.

The circuit mostly works as expected.

Problem

For a 200 kHz, 7 Vpp square wave, the positive peak detector is only ~1% off from the peak positive wave voltage indicated on my oscilloscope. However, the negative peak detector output is ~10% less (in magnitude) than the peak on the negative side of the wave, and has large offsets when inputs are small.

Below is some data I measured from the actual circuit with square waves of various amplitudes and offsets at 200kHz. V+peak is the peak positive voltage of the square wave at the input to the circuit. V-peak is minimum negative voltage of the square wave. V+out is the output of the positive peak detector. V-out is the output of the negative peak detector.

V+peak | V-peak | V+out | V-out |
0.22V   0.00V    0.22V   0.17V
2.16V  -2.40V    2.15V  -2.08V
3.66V   0.00V    3.63V   0.18V
3.48V  -3.84V    3.48V  -3.49V


Notice there's also a pretty extreme offset voltage from the negative peak detector on DC square waves (the ones that don't go below 0V).

My negative peak detector has exactly the same circuit as the positive detector (shown), except that the polarity of the diodes is reversed.

Circuit explanation

Initially, the capacitor is discharged (0V) by R11 and U3 is in negative saturation. D3 blocks current. D4's bias current is provided by U1 through the 47K resistor. This configuration exists to prevent the diodes' reverse leakage from draining C12 and reduces droop of the output signal.

If U3's non-inverting input exceeds the voltage of the capacitor, the output of U3 races up to a positive value and current flows through D3 and D4. The voltage drop of the diodes is negated due to the feedback voltage being after the drop. The capacitor charges until it reaches VIN or when VIN drops below it's the capacitor's voltage, at the time of which U3 goes back into negative saturation. The capacitor slowly discharges through the R11. This is a major source of droop on fast or low duty cycle signals since it will discharge some before the next wave peak.

U1 is a unity-gain output buffer that prevents the next stage from draining the capacitor.

For the negative peak follower, the same explanation holds, except that the input op amp can't charge the capacitor unless its output is negative in excess of the capacitor's charge voltage.

Here's the data sheet for the AD843: http://www.analog.com/static/imported-files/data_sheets/AD843.pdf

It has a high slew rate (250V/us) and output current (50 mA) and low offset voltage (1 mV).

Question

Why is my negative peak detector performing so poorly (offset voltage, droop) compared to the positive detector?

Am I missing some essential element in converting the positive peak detector circuit to a negative peak detector?

• Are the power supplies for the opamps completely symmetrical? – Dave Tweed Oct 16 '12 at 21:54
• No, actually... The rails are +9V/-10V. I had to substitute a 9V regulator due to availability. I thought about this being an issue, but if anything I think it would cause the positive to perform worse than the positive, since it has to race up from a lower saturation voltage. – Steven T. Snyder Oct 16 '12 at 22:05
• I will now look around for a stable -9V (or +10V) supply to use for testing to see if it makes a difference. – Steven T. Snyder Oct 16 '12 at 22:06
• In setting up my power supply to produce +10/-10 so I could bypass the board's regulators and use it directly, I just realized that it was already set for +10/-10, and not +14.5/-14.5 like I designed the circuit for. DOH!!! The -10 regulator was probably in dropout. – Steven T. Snyder Oct 16 '12 at 22:10
• Yes, and its source impedance is probably quite a bit higher than normal in dropout. – Dave Tweed Oct 16 '12 at 22:24