For whom are Evaluation Board for Operational Amplifier

[egonotto]

Hello,

there are many different Evaluation Boards for Operational Amplifier.

For example
Evaluation Board for the ADA4522-2
Evaluation Board for the ADA4625-2
Evaluating Board for the ADA4523-1

My question is, what is the target group.

Is this for hobby people that can not design a PCB Board for the Operational Amplifier?
Or is this for professional?

But if a professional want try a Operational Amplifier, is it not better to design a test PCB for the specific requirement?

Best regards
egonotto

[Someone]

Building a board can end up costing more than buying it off the shelf (time spent in layout and procurement add up quickly). So they are useful before you start designing. Also useful when there is some issue with an assembled product just to eliminate variables (is it the larger designs power supply, or some coupled noise?) by testing the part in a simpler situation.

[Jay_Diddy_B]

Hi,
The semiconductor manufacturers have gone to a lot of trouble to design the evaluation boards so that will give 'datasheet' performance. It may have taken a few revisions to achieve this.

In addition to being used to evaluate the parts, in this case high performance op-amps, in a typical application. They are also reference designs that can be copied into products. 

Jay_Diddy_B

[rstofer]

They are also reference designs that can be copied into products. 

Jay_Diddy_B

And this is probably the reason I buy them even as a hobbyist.  There are sometimes design issues that might be incorporated in the evaluation board that aren't well described in the datasheet.

TI is especially good about having evaluation boards.  Sometimes they are just fun:

https://www.ti.com/tool/TI-PLABS-AMP-EVM

[RoGeorge]

My question is, what is the target group.

Is this for hobby people that can not design a PCB Board for the Operational Amplifier?
Or is this for professional?

But if a professional want try a Operational Amplifier, is it not better to design a test PCB for the specific requirement?

The target group is the electronic design engineers, not the hobbyist.

Many devices have their particularities and subtleties that might not be well understood at first, so a reference design and a proper PCB layout are of great help.

It will be a huge waste of time (multiplied with the number of designers) if each design engineer will start to experiment with each product, not knowing what to blame when something does not meet the expectations.

[SiliconWizard]

Yes, those are reference designs. Occasionally, some of those boards are a bit crappy, but generally speaking, they are designed to meet the specs claimed in datasheets.

You may wonder what the point exactly is for opamps, but if you're selecting some particular opamp based on some specific characteristic, such as very low input offset, bandwidth, or whatever, you may want to check that it'll meet your expectations, and test it in real conditions.

Making your own boards just for this is usually a complete waste of time in a professional setting. Just try and estimate the *real* cost of designing a board, even a simple one, within some company. Add up all salary costs involved. The cost of just the PCB and parts will be marginal. The overall cost will usually exceed that of a vendor-made evaluation board by a large margin.

That's actually something that may be different for hobbyists or very small companies, for which making your own boards may be worth the trouble, so that's kinda opposite of what you assumed.

There are exceptions to that - eval boards for MCUs, for instance, are often popular among hobbyists, because they are often cheap and ready to use. ("Cheap" may not be the case for "higher-end" or "niche" MCUs, for which eval boards from vendors can be very expensive, though.)

[hans]

It's aimed at professionals. An design engineer hour rate is probably in the 3 digits per hour (USD or EUR) range. The opamp you mentioned is 5EUR. The eval board is 32 EUR. That means an engineer would have at most 16 minutes to solder the opamp onto an adapter board, get some SMAs or other connectors he wants to use for signal connections, solder everything together on veroboard, and then hope it's all assembled well before testing. Assuming that SMAs, veroboard and any other soldering related issues (like access to solder area) are handled for free.
If you think about making a custom PCB, the time to start up a CAD tool and get coffee has passed before even drawing a single line in the schematic. It's really just easier to buy the eval board.

Now I must say this example was relatively cheap. To me it seems like some eval boards are targetted clearly to industry professionals only (some eval board cost >400 euro for almost the same thing as some <50 euro boards cost). However,others boards are more widely accessible. As a hobbyist I've bought some eval boards before.. Some were a decent deal, for example: https://nl.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Analog-Devices/EVAL-AD7192EBZ?qs=WIvQP4zGaniYyF5h96bxzQ%3D%3D

Just on the looks of it, 60 EUR seems expensive for an ADC eval card, even if it connects to USB and can log data with presupplied software. But the board comes with 2 'free' samples of the ADC that's been evaluated. The 2 ICs are just tacked on with 2 pins. The ADC on it's own costs 12 euro, so the plug'n'play evaluation part of this package costs 36 euro (or 24 if you sacrifice the ADC on the eval section).
My time as a hobbyist is pretty cheap, but even for 36 euro's I can't mess around for an afternoon to get some ADC samples on my screen.

[EPAIII]

The target group?

Anybody with the $$$$$.

[luudee]

The target group is definitely professionals, who will buy the parts in large quantities.

The chip makes (like Analog Devices) do not make money of these PCBs, many times
they actually sell them at a loss. I know it doesn't appear to be that way as the prices
may seem high, but if you consider all the work that goes in to them, it will make sense.
Selling these boards to hobbyists, helps them to offset the cost slightly. Remember, these
boards are only made in (relatively) small quantities..

We do both, buy and make our own eval boards. For example, we recently built an eval
board to evaluate a dc/dc converter. The goal was to better understand the quality of the
output and thermal requirements. On other occasions, we have also bought eval boards
from manufacturers. The problem with pre-made boards, they might not use the same
support components as you will in your final design. When we make our own eval boards,
we can use the actual components we are planning to use in the final design. Making
our own boards, also allows us to make sure we understood the layout requirements -
specially when it comes to dc/dc converters.
For  OP-Amps we would definitely try to buy an eval board from the manufacturer ...

cheers,
rudi