NAME: Ahzam Khan

ID: 221679
SECTION: BEMTS-III-B
LAB NO: 09
DATE 10-12-2023

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 The Widlar Current Source
Objective:
To build and investigate the functionality of Widlar Current Source

Components Required:
Power
Supply
Digital
Multi
meter
BJT
(LM39
4)

Description:
The two-transistor current source, also called as current mirror, is the basic
building block in the IC current source circuits.

Basic current source circuit consists of two identical transistors, operating

at the same temperature, with base and emitter terminals connected together. B-E
voltage is therefore the
same for both transistors. One of the transistors (QREF) is connected as a diode. When
a voltage is applied, the B-E junction of QREF is forward biased and a reference current
IREF is established. Because the B-E voltage is the same for both the transistors a load
current IO is established in the load transistor (QO).

When the desired current (IO) is small, the Widlar current source may be a better
alternative.
For instance if the required output bias current IO = 10 A, then, for V+ = 5V and V- = -5V the
required resistance value for RREF is about 930 k . In IC, resistors on the
order of 1M require large areas and are difficult to fabricate accurately.
Therefore we need to replace that resistance with one into k range. The
Widlar current source meets that objective. A voltage difference is
produced across resistor RE, so that B-E voltage of Q2 is less then B-E voltage of Q1.
A smaller B-E voltage produce a smaller collector current, which means the load current
IO is less than the reference current IREF.
The Widlar Current Source is shown in Figure

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 For Widlar current source, the

following holds:

LM394 Supermatch Pair:

The LM194 and LM394 are junction isolated ultra well matched monolithic NPN
transistor pairs with an order of magnitude improvement in matching over

conventional transistor pairs. The pin diagram of metal can package is shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 2: Pin diagram of LM394

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Procedure:
• Make the connections on the bread board as shown in Figure 3 using LM394.
Apply VCC = 5 V
• Choose appropriate values of RREF, RE and R0 according to the values of reference
current and output current.

Figure 3: Circuit to be implemented

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SOFT WARE
IMPLEMETATION:

HARD WARE IMPLEMENTATION:

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CONCLUSINON:
In this lab we knew about wilder current source. A Wilder current source is a modification
of the basic two-transistor current mirror that incorporates an emitter degeneration
resistor for only the output transistor, enabling the current source to generate low
currents using only moderate resistor values.

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c

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