Category Archives: transistor biasing

Biasing That Transistor: The Emitter Follower

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We were musing upon the relative paucity of education with respect to the fundamentals of electronic circuitry with discrete semiconductors, so we thought we’d do something about it. So far we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing through the common emitter amplifier, then introduced a less common configuration, the common base amplifier. There is a third transistor amplifier configuration, as you might expect for a device that has three terminals: the so-called Common Collector amplifier. You might also know this configuration as the Emitter Follower. It’s called a “follower” because it tracks the input voltage, offering …read more

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Biasing That Transistor: The Common Base Amplifier

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We’ve previously remarked upon a generation lucky enough to be well-versed in microcontrollers and computersised electronics through being brought up on the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi but unlucky enough to have missed out on basic electronics such as how to bias a transistor, and to address that gap we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing.

All the circuits we worked with in the previous article had the transistor’s emitter taken to ground, took their input from the base, and their output from the collector. This configuration, called a Common Emitter amplifier is probably the most common, …read more

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Biasing That Transistor: The Common Emitter Amplifier

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If you open up the perennial favourite electronics textbook The Art Of Electronics and turn to the section on transistors, you will see a little cartoon. A transistor is shown as a room in which “transistor man” stands watching a dial showing the base current, while adjusting a potentiometer that limits the collector current. If you apply a little more base current, he pushes up the collector a bit. If you wind back the base current, he drops it back. It’s a simple but effective way of explaining the basic operation of a transistor, but it stops short of some …read more

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