《Electronic Circuit Design1模拟电子技术》Transistors - BJT.pdfVIP

89 EE-1029 4. Bipolar Junction Transistors 4.1 Introduction Transistors are active, three-terminal devices that have the important property of being able to produce power amplification or gain . Almost all-electronic circuits contain transistors, and in the case of Very Large Scale Integrated circuits (VLSI) there are literally millions of transistors connected together on a small chip of silicon. The bipolar junction transistor or BJT was invented in 1948 at Bell Laboratories in the USA by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The term ‘bipolar’ tells us that both types of charge carrier, holes and electrons, are involved in the conduction mechanisms that go on within the transistor. Early devices were manufactured from germanium but nowadays nearly all transistors are made from silicon because of its superior properties. At its simplest level the construction of a bipolar transistor can be pictured as a thin layer of p-type semiconductor material sandwiched between two outer layers of n-type semiconductor material, as shown in figure 4.1(a). Note that the n-type regions are referred to as the emitter and collector of the transistor and the p-type region is called the base. Although the very earliest transistors were constructed in this fashion, the majority of modern devices do not physically resemble the structure shown here. We will look at the structure of a modern transistor in more detail later. Collector C C n Base B B p