ECE 330 Basic Electronics

Engr. Bautista
John Lloyd A. Vincoy
BSME-3
1. What are Transistors?

A transistor is a device that regulates current or voltage flow and acts as a switch or gate
for electronic signals. Transistors consist of three layers of a semiconductor material,
each capable of carrying a current.

The transistor was invented by three scientists at the Bell Laboratories in 1947, and
it rapidly replaced the vacuum tube as an electronic signal regulator. A transistor
regulates current or voltage flow and acts as a switch or gate for electronic signals. A
transistor consists of three layers of a semiconductor material, each capable of carrying a
current. A semiconductor is a material such as germanium and silicon that conducts
electricity in a "semi-enthusiastic" way. It's somewhere between a real conductor such as
copper and an insulator (like the plastic wrapped around wires).

2. How do transistors work?

A transistor is really simple—and really complex. Let's start with the simple part. A transistor is
a miniature electronic component that can do two different jobs. It can work either as
an amplifier or a switch:

When it works as an amplifier, it takes in a tiny electric current at one end (an input current) and
produces a much bigger electric current (an output current) at the other. In other words, it's a
kind of current booster. That comes in really useful in things like hearing aids, one of the first
things people used transistors for. A hearing aid has a tiny microphone in it that picks
up sounds from the world around you and turns them into fluctuating electric currents. These are
fed into a transistor that boosts them and powers a tiny loudspeaker, so you hear a much louder
version of the sounds around you. William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, once
explained transistor-amplifiers to a student in a more humorous way: "If you take a bale of hay
and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you
then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by
yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

Transistors can also work as switches. A tiny electric current flowing through one part of a
transistor can make a much bigger current flow through another part of it. In other words, the
small current switches on the larger one. This is essentially how all computer chips work. For
example, a memory chip contains hundreds of millions or even billions of transistors, each of
which can be switched on or off individually. Since each transistor can be in two distinct states,
it can store two different numbers, zero and one. With billions of transistors, a chip can store
billions of zeros and ones, and almost as many ordinary numbers and letters (or characters, as we
call them). More about this in a moment.

The great thing about old-style machines was that you could take them apart to figure out how
they worked. It was never too hard, with a bit of pushing and poking, to discover which bit did
what and how one thing led to another. But electronics is entirely different. It's all about
using electrons to control electricity. An electron is a minute particle inside an atom. It's so
small, it weighs just under 0.000000000000000000000000000001 kg! The most advanced
transistors work by controlling the movements of individual electrons, so you can imagine just
how small they are. In a modern computer chip, the size of a fingernail, you'll probably find
between 500 million and two billion separate transistors. There's no chance of taking a transistor
apart to find out how it works, so we have to understand it with theory and imagination instead.
First off, it helps if we know what a transistor is made from.

3. Give the types if transistors and discuss them.

Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT)

Bipolar Junction Transistors are transistors that are built up of 3 regions, the base, the collector,
and the emitter. Bipolar Junction transistors, different FET transistors, are current-controlled
devices. A small current entering the base region of the transistor causes a much larger current
flow from the emitter to the collector region. Bipolar junction transistors come in two major
types, NPN and PNP. An NPN transistor is one in which the majority of the current carriers are
electrons.
Electron flowing from the emitter to the collector forms the base of the majority of current flow
through the transistor. The further types of charge, holes, are a minority. PNP transistors are the
opposite. In PNP transistors, the majority of current carrier holes. BJT transistors are available in
two types namely PNP and NPN
PNP Transistor

This transistor is another kind of BJT – Bipolar Junction Transistors and it contains two p-type
semiconductor materials. These materials are divided through a thin n-type semiconductor layer.
In these transistors, the majority charge carriers are holes whereas the minority charge carriers
are electrons.

In this transistor, the arrow symbol indicates the conventional current flow. The direction of
current flow in this transistor is from the emitter terminal to the collector terminal. This transistor
will be turned ON once the base terminal is dragged to LOW as compared with the emitter
terminal. The PNP transistor with a symbol is shown below.
NPN Transistor

NPN is also one kind of BJT (Bipolar Junction Transistors) and it includes two n-type
semiconductor materials which are divided through a thin p-type semiconductor layer. IN the
NPN transistor, the majority charge carriers are electrons whereas the minority charge carriers
are holes. The electrons flow from the emitter terminal to the collector terminal will form the
current flow within the base terminal of the transistor.

In the transistor, the less amount of current supply at the base terminal can cause supply huge
amount of current from the emitter terminal to the collector. At present, the commonly used
BJTs are NPN transistors, as the electrons mobility is higher as compared with the mobility of
holes. The NPN transistor with a symbol is shown below.

Field Effect Transistor

Field Effect Transistors are made up of 3 regions, a gate, a source, and a drain. Different bipolar
transistors, FETs are voltage-controlled devices. A voltage placed at the gate controls current
flow from the source to the drain of the transistor. Field Effect transistors have a very high input
impedance, from several mega ohms (MΩ) of resistance to much, much larger values.
This high input impedance causes them to have very little current run through them. (According
to ohm’s law, the current is inversely affected by the value of the impedance of the circuit. If the
impedance is high, the current is very low.) So FETs both draw very little current from a circuit’s
power source.

Field Effect Transistors

Thus, this is ideal because they don’t disturb the original circuit power elements to which they
are connected to. They won’t cause the power source to be loaded down. The drawback of FETs
is that they won’t provide the same amplification that could be gotten from bipolar transistors.

Bipolar transistors are superior in the fact that they provide greater amplification, even though
FETs are better in that they cause less loading, are cheaper, and easier to manufacture. Field
Effect Transistors come in 2 main types: JFETs and MOSFETs. JFETs and MOSFETs are very
similar but MOSFETs have even higher input impedance values than JFETs. This causes even
less loading in a circuit. FET transistors are classified into two types namely JFET and
MOSFET.
JFET

The JFET stands for Junction-Field-Effect transistor. This is simple as well as an initial type of
FET transistors which are utilized like resistors, amplifiers, switches, etc. This is a voltage-
controlled device and it doesn’t use any biasing current. Once the voltage is applied among gate
& source terminals then it controls the current flow among the source & drain of the JFET
transistor.

The Junction Field Effect Transistor (JUGFET or JFET) has no PN-junctions but in its place has
a narrow part of high resistivity semiconductor material forming a “Channel” of either N-type or
P-type silicon for the majority carriers to flow through with two ohmic electrical connections at
either end normally called the Drain and the Source respectively.

Junction Field Effect Transistors

There are two basic configurations of a junction field-effect transistor, the N-channel JFET and
the P-channel JFET. The N-channel JFET’s channel is doped with donor impurities meaning that
the flow of current through the channel is negative (hence the term N-channel) in the form of
electrons. These transistors are accessible in both P-channel and N-channel types.

MOSFET

MOSFET or Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor is most frequently used among

all kinds of transistors. As the name suggests, it includes the terminal of the metal gate. This
transistor includes four terminals like source, drain, gate & substrate, or body.
 MOSFET
As compared with BJT and JFET, MOSFETs has several benefits as it provides high i/p
impedance as well as low o/p impedance. MOSFETs are mainly used in low power circuits
especially while designing chips. These transistors are available in two types like depletion &
enhancement. Further, these types are categorized into P-channel & N-channel types.

The main features of FET include the following.

 It is unipolar because the charge carriers like either electrons or holes are accountable
for transmission.
 In FET, the input current will flow because of the reverse bias. Therefore the input
impedance of this transistor is high.
 When the o/p voltage of the field-effect transistor is controlled through the input
voltage of the gate, then this transistor is named the voltage-controlled device.
 In the conduction lane, there are no junctions present. So FETs have less noise as
compared with BJTs.
 The characterization of gain can be done with transconductance because it is the ratio
of o/p change current and input voltage change
 The o/p impedance of the FET is low.
 4. Discuss the relationship of transistors with respect to vacuum tubes and semiconductors.

From Tubes...
Any modern digital computer is largely a collection of electronic switches. These switches are
used to represent and control the routing of data elements called binary digits (or bits).Because
of the on-or-off nature of the binary information and signal routing the computer uses, an
efficient electronic switch was required. The first electronic computers used vacuum tubes as
switches, and although the tubes worked, they had many problems.
To Transistors
The invention of the transistor was one of the most important developments leading to the
personal computer revolution.The transistor was invented in 1947 and announced in 1948 by
Bell Laboratory engineers John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Bell associate William Shockley
invented the junction transistor a few months later, and all three jointly shared the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1956 for inventing the transistor. The transistor, which essentially functions as a solid-
state electronic switch, replaced the less-suitable vacuum tube. Because the transistor was so
much smaller and consumed significantly less power, a computer system built with transistors
was also much smaller, faster, and more efficient than a computer system built with vacuum
tubes.

To Semiconductor
When a MOSFET transistor turns on, the gate capacitor applies an electric field to the channel,
creating an inversion layer. This allows minority carriers (holes in pFETs, electrons in nFETs) to
flow between the source and the drain. When the transistor is off there is no capacitance: the
energy barriers between the source, drain, and channel prevent current flow. As transistors
shrink, the electric field density needed to create the inversion layer increases, and so the gate
capacitance must increase. Up to a point, this is accomplished by reducing the thickness of the
gate dielectric. As the gate dielectric thickness falls to only a few nanometers, however, quantum
mechanical effects allow carriers to tunnel through it, increasing gate leakage and ultimately
shorting the transistor.
 5. What are the applications of the transistors that we are using in our day to day lives?

The transistor is a semiconductor device and its use to regulate the supply current or voltage. It
can be used as a switch in electrical circuits and also use as an amplifier. so here we sort out the
main applications of transistor for you.
Here we list the applications of transistors. (practical applications of transistors):
1. Transistors are used in digital and analog circuits as a switch.
2. uses in signal amplifier devices
3. Cellular phones would be one of the most widely used applications of transistors. Every cell
phone uses a transistor amplifier.
4. uses in power regulator and controllers
5. in modern electronics IC uses in almost every electronics application. Transistors are used in
building some of the integrated circuits (IC).
6. The microprocessor includes more than billions of transistors in each chip.
7. Transistors are used in almost every electronics device from stoves to computers and
pacemakers to aircraft.
8. in calculators, computers, radios and also hearing phones every daily life device which
requires good sound quality (because transistor are often used in amplifying circuits)
9.  The military used the transistor’s high-power radio frequency (RF) abilities in radar and hand-
held two-way radios.
10. Darlington transistor pairs are often used in touch- and light-sensing devices.
11. Radiation – hardened transistor is often used in satellite and other aerospace applications.
After knowing some brief everyday uses of transistors, we take look into some important
transistor applications in details: