Duke University

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECE 110L: Fundamentals of ECE

Huettel, Ybarra, Coonley

Writing an Effective Laboratory Report Conclusion

The Conclusion is the fifth and final (regular) section of a formal laboratory report,
following the Abstract, Introduction, Experimental Procedure and Results, and Analysis and
Discussion. The conclusion must effectively tie together the objectives, experimental results, and
analysis. You must state whether the objectives of the exercise were fulfilled and briefly state the
reasons for your claim. You should address each objective separately. It is unacceptable to simply
state that all of the lab exercise objectives were fulfilled.

It is common for students, upon learning to write an effective laboratory report including
all five sections, to experience a sense of redundancy across the report sections. The Abstract
summarizes the important elements of the exercise including results and conclusions in a very
concise manner. The Introduction provides background and motivation for the experimental
procedure. The Experimental Procedure and Results section provides details of the experimental
process that would allow another person to reproduce the results presented. The Analysis and
Discussion section provides theoretical analyses and compares the theoretical results with the
experimental results as well as a critical interpretation and evaluation of these results. The
conclusion ties together the elements of the entire report and provides closure. All formal scientific
papers provide information in this manner.

Consider the following three Conclusions of an ECE lab report on the topic of the LM741
Operational Amplifier, a very useful Integrated Circuit (IC) device used to amplify small signals
in electronic circuits.

Sample Conclusions

Conclusion 1: (Very poor)

This lab was partially successful in calculating the voltage gain of inverting and
noninverting amplifiers. For our first two circuits, our percent error values were very high, and the
exact reasons for this are not completely known. Both our comparator circuit and our second non-
inverting amplifier circuit performed extremely well with low values for percent error. We can
conclude based on the results of this lab, what the exact difference is between the 741 operational
amplifier and an ideal amplifier because of the fact that our values had completely different
amounts of error. We do know, however, that a non-ideal operational amplifier will never be able
to produce a higher voltage gain than an ideal operational amplifier.
This lab showed how versatile the operational amplifier is. It is even more remarkable to
think that there are many uses of the operational amplifier that were not investigated in this lab.
The operational amplifier can be used as a filter, an analog-to-digital converter, and as a buffer, as
well as a pre-amplifier and a comparator (as examined in lab).

© 02.26.14 Huettel, Ybarra, Coonley

Conclusion 2: (Very good)
This lab exercise has three objectives. The first objective is to measure the offset voltage
and slew rate for an LM741 operational amplifier and compare these measured values with the
range of values specified by the manufacturer. Our measured values of offset voltage and slew rate
were within 5% of the typical values, well below the maximum values specified by the
manufacturer. The second objective is to measure closed loop and open loop voltage gains and
compare them to the manufacturer’s specifications. We measured the closed loop voltage gain for
three different feedback resistance values and the maximum error obtained was 8%. Our measured
value of the open loop voltage gain (103) was two orders of magnitude less than the specified value
of 2x105. After reviewing the technical specifications of the LM741, we have determined that this
very large difference is due to the fact that we made the measurement at 1 kHz. The LM741 has a
specified gain-bandwidth product of 1 MHz, which produces a predicted gain of 103 at a frequency
of 1 kHz. Thus, our measurement of the open loop gain is in fact consistent with the specified
value. The third objective of the lab exercise is to measure the halfpower (-3 dB) frequency of the
voltage follower circuit (unity gain) and compare this value to the specified value of 1 MHz. Our
measured value of 986 kHz resulted in a 1.4% difference between the measured and specified
values.
Given that we were able to identify and justify the reason for our open loop voltage gain
measurement and that our worst case measurement error was 8%, we conclude that all three
objectives of this lab exercise have been successfully fulfilled.
It should be noted that many of the specifications of the LM741 op-amp are poor
compared to the currently available MOSFET op-amps. This is expected as the LM741 was one
of the first op-amps developed in the late 1960’s and as such uses then state-of-the-art BJT
technology whose performance is not as good as newer devices now available.

Conclusion 3: (Poor)
During the lab, we learned to use op-amps in circuits to build inverting and non-inverting
amplifiers as well as using them as comparator. The experiments allow us to become familiarized
with the actual functions of these different types of circuits using op-amps, and the final project
section shows an actual practical use of one of these circuits. The non-inverting amplifier circuit
will be used in our final project in order to increase the magnitude of a DC voltage that results
from some received signal. The only unexplained errors in the lab were the unusually low
magnitudes of the maximum and minimum values of the output signal of the amplifier circuits
when we increased the amplitude of the input signal so that clipping occurred. The limits were
supposed to be set by the +vcc and –vcc rails, but the magnitudes of the actual minimum and
maximum were smaller.

© 02.26.14 Huettel, Ybarra, Coonley