Lecture 26

Distortion in a BJT Amplifier

The exponential nature of the BJT collector current leads to several forms of distortion: There are two extremes:
Cutoff: If the input voltage swing goes too low, the emitter base junction goes out of forward bias and the BJT shuts off. The output is fixed at VCC. This would be known as hard limiting. Saturation: When the collector base junction goes into forward bias, the beta of the BJT starts dropping. The current through the BJT becomes nearly constant and the collector emitter voltage becomes nearly constant too.
here the voltage output of the amplifier will no longer have a large gain, but it is not hard limiting like the cutoff effect.

Mroe Dstirooitn
Even before we reach these hard limits there are other distortions that will occur. Why were they called hard limits? They are fundamentally limited by the supply voltage range. If our input exceeds the linearity limit, then we will see a variable gain depending on the input amplitude.
The negative swing of the signal will see a lower gain. The positive swing will see a higher gain That is until saturation starts, then the gain will go low again

Example 3
Recall the amplifier we looked at last time. In that case we did not consider any of the limits on the input and output of the amplifier. The two limits are on the input and output amplitudes If we trace a test signal through the amplifier, we can see the nature of these limits: Let us choose a triangle wave with an amplitude of 20mV at the base. This is the maximum allowable to avoid distortion.

Example 3
Last time we determined how much the voltage is reduced by passing through the divider composed of the base resistor and the base-emitter resistance. We need to determine if the amplifier will still be in the active mode with this applied voltage
We first find the output voltage It is still in the active mode.
V 10mV Vi = be = = 0.91V 0.011 0.011

=V A = 0.91 3.04 = 2.77V V C i v

Note that we can ignore the fact that the base voltage increases (which might bring about saturation sooner) because the upswing is only 10mV

Example 3
Even though 0.91V is the maximum limit for linearity, let us choose a value with a little more comfort room: 0.8V This will yield a peak current in the base of: Remember that this is on top of the DC bias current The peak of the base-emitter voltage from the signal is: From beta, we can determine what the collector current signal will be: Lastly, the voltage output will be:

= I b

V 0.8 i = = 8A RBB + r 100k + 1.09k

=V V be i

r = 8.6mV r + RBB

= I = 100 8A = 0.8mA I C b

= 3.04k 0.8mA = 2.43V V C

Accounting for The Early Effect

We can account for the early effect in our small signal models by placing a resistor in parallel with the emitter collector terminals. This is the same as was done with the MOSFET. V +V The value of ro is given as: ro = A CE IC Much like the MOSFET configurations where the emitter is not grounded make inclusion of the early effect complicated.

VA IC

BJT Amplifiers
The last topic we will cover is the configurations for a BJT amplifier They should look familiar as they are the same as the MOSFET There are some differences
Of course the terminals are labeled differently, so the names will differ More importantly, the fact that the base draws current means the input resistances will be different

Recall the formulae for the generalized amplifiers in the MOSFET chapter, they are the same.

Biasing of BJT Amps.

The biasing scheme of choice for the BJT amplifier is going to be a constant current source. This avoids the problem of variable beta and temperature changes. Bear in mind that the small signal model will require us to bypass this current source for certain geometries One goal is to set RB as big as possible to avoid losses of the signal to ground. But we also need to keep the voltage drop across RB small to avoid problems with varying betas.