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Basic Circuit Configurations

In any transistor circuit design you must supply a DC bias current and voltage to operate in the linear region of the characteristic curve. The DC operating point is defined by the values of and . You must also obtain the proper AC operation.

The transistor is a three-terminal device that we will use to form a four-terminal circuit. Small voltage changes in the base-emitter junction will produce large current changes in the collector and emitter, whereas small changes in the collector-emitter voltage have little effect on the base. The result is that the base is always part of the input to a four-terminal network. There are three common configurations: common emitter (CE), common collector (CC) and common base (CB), as shown in figure 5.5.

 
Figure 5.5:  Transistor basic circuit configurations: a) common emitter (CE), b) common collector (CC) and c) common base (CB).

The operating characteristics of the different circuit configurations are shown in table 5.1.

 
Table 5.1:  Operating characteristics of different transistor circuit configurations.



Doug Gingrich
Tue Jul 13 16:55:15 EDT 1999