COURSE

Electronics for Starters (2)

Transistors in action
By Burkhard Kainka (Germany)

Electronic devices are becoming more

and more complex, which makes it
increasingly difficult for beginners to get
up to speed. In this series we therefore
aim to get back to basics.
In this instalment we present some
interesting experiments with transistors. We
also have a quiz for you, with the chance of

winning a nice prize. can implement a wide enough current to cause any-
variety of functions with thing to go up in smoke.
Transistors can easily be regarded as one of a single discrete transistor, as
the most significant technological inven- we demonstrate in this instalment. Now let’s try a set of simple experiments:
tions ever. Many aspects of modern eve- 1. When contacts A and B are not con-
ryday live — including computers, mobile First experiments nected, the LED should remain dark.
phones and the Internet — would be impos- Start by building the circuit shown in Fig- 2. Connect A and B together. The LED
sible without them. In the 1950s these small ure 1, for example on an Elektor Elex board should light up brightly.
semiconductor components started dis- (see elektor.com/120002). This allows you 3. Bridge A and B with a wet finger. The LED
placing vacuum valves, which had played a to use the same board for several experi- should light up more or less dimly.
dominant role up to then. Germanium tran- ments and utilise the through tracks for 4. Leave A and B open, and see what hap-
sistors were the first to become popular, fol- power and ground rails. A 9-V battery pens when you short the emitter (E) and col-
lowed later by bipolar silicon transistors and provides a convenient source of power. lector (C) leads of the transistor together.
even later by field-effect transistors. Tech- It doesn’t need to be fully charged – for The LED should light up brightly.
nological progress in this area was acceler- example, a battery retired from service in 5. Connect A and B again (the LED should
ated by the invention of integrated circuits a smoke detector will do nicely. A weak be lit), and then short the base lead (B) to
(ICs), which contain a large number of tran- battery actually has the advantage that ground. The LED should go dark.
sistors in a single package. However, you if something goes wrong, it can’t supply

LED

PNP
100k
100k

IC = 30 mA

BC557
1k

9V 9V
A
100k

1k

B C C
B B
BC547B BC547B
IB = 0,1 mA
E E

Figure 1. Our first experimental setup. Figure 2. Basic current gain circuit. Figure 3. A PNP transistor in a
common-emitter circuit.

48 02-2012 elektor
 COURSE

Glory days of
TUP and TUN

1k
There are so many different types of tran-
sistors that it can be difficult to decide

1k
100k
9V 9V
which one to use. In the distant past Elek-
1k

100k
tor used the designations ‘TUP’ (transis-
BC547
tor universal PNP) and ‘TUN’ (transistor
BC547
universal NPN), but in those days it was
100u
possible to buy unmarked transistors
a bit cheaper than marked ones, and
‘TUN’ simply meant any type of general-
Figure 4. A transistor configured Figure 5. Delayed switch-off.
purpose small-signal NPN transistor.
as an inverter.
Nowadays you are well advised to use
the BC547B; it almost always fits and is a
sort of modern TUN. You should actually
This set of experiments illustrates the basic have a bag of them on hand, and it won’t
operating principle of a transistor: a small One of the difficulties in designing tran-
make a big dent in your budget. For the
base current (between the base and the sistor circuits is that you do not know the
TUP the natural choice is the BC557B.
emitter) controls a larger collector current exact gain of the transistor. Unlike resis-
(between the collector and the emitter). tors, which are readily available with a tol-
C C
We say that the base current is amplified, erance of 1%, it is very difficult to manufac- C
B PNP
NPN
and roughly speaking, we can regard the ture transistors to tight tolerances. The gain E
B B

amplification factor (or gain) as constant. in particular shows a considerable range of C

B
E
The widely used BC547B transistor has a variation. In the case of the BC547, the gains E E

gain of approximately 300, which means of individual devices in a new fabrication

that the collector current is a factor of 300 batch can lie anywhere between 110 to 800.
The key BC547B specs are:
greater than the base current (Figure 2). These new devices are measured by auto-
However, this is only true if it is not limited mated equipment and sorted into the three Maximum collector voltage: 45 V
to a smaller value by a collector resistor (as gain groups A, B and C (see the ‘TUP/TUN’ Maximum collector current: 100 mA
in the circuit shown in Figure 1). inset). The range of gains in these three
Current gain: 200 to 450 (290 typical)
groups is still fairly large, which is simply a
Circuit design fact of life for circuit designers. They must The BC547A has a current gain of 110 to
In order to design a transistor circuit, you design their circuits to work properly with 220 (180 typical), and the BC547C has a
first need to know exactly what you want every transistor in the selected group. This
current gain of 420 to 800 (520 typical).
to achieve. sometimes requires a bit of calculation; in
If you examine the current gain curves in
many cases just trying it out is not enough.
a) Should the transistor operate as a switch more detail, you will see that the current
and be either fully off (cut off) or fully on Now let’s have a look at the circuit shown gain of a transistor is fairly constant only
(conducting)? in Figure 3. A PNP transistor operates in the at moderate collector currents; it drops
b) Or should the transistor operate as an same way as an NPN transistor, but it has significantly at relatively high and low
analogue gain stage and allow more or less the opposite polarity. This means that the current levels.
current to flow? emitter is connected to the positive termi-
nal of the battery. This circuit has an addi-
You have already tried both options in the tional LED in the base circuit. It is intended cuit. Here the LED lights up when the switch
initial set of experiments. When contacts A to show that the base current is much lower is closed and goes dark when the switch is
and B are joined together, the transistor is than the collector current, which is why the open. The reason for this is that when the
driven fully into conduction (switched on), light from the green LED is very dim. switch is closed, the base circuit is closed
although it has more internal resistance in through the LED and a current flows into the
this state than a real switch with two metal- Inverter base. This causes the transistor to conduct,
lic contacts. As a result, there is always a From high to low, from on to off: inverters and it shorts out the voltage over the red
small voltage drop between the emitter perform a very simple task in the world of LED. If you measure the voltage between
and the collector. With the wet finger exper- computers and microcontrollers. However, the collector and the emitter, you will find
iment you were in the analogue camp, and a transistor can do this just as well. Up to that it is around 100 mV. At this low voltage
you may have noticed that the brightness now we have been using our transistor as the current through the LED is virtually nil,
of the LED depends on how hard you press a sort of controlled switch: if you switch on so it remains dark.
your finger against the contacts. The choice the base current, the transistor switches on
of liquid also plays a role here – for example, the load current. But you can also reverse Delayed switch-off circuit
cola yields more current than tea, due to the (invert) the switching function with a tran- The current gain of a transistor can be used
acids in the cola. sistor. Figure 4 shows a simple inverter cir- to extend the discharge time of a capacitor.

elektor 02-2012 49
COURSE

Microcontroller time switch

Modern time switches are built around mi-
crocontrollers. This allows them to achieve +5V +12V

high precision without calibration. RC tim-

100k
ing circuits have evidently had their day, but

1k
VCC PB2 PB1 PB0
there’s one thing a microcontroller cannot 9V
ATtiny13
do: switch high currents. For this you need
12V
a transistor. A simple NPN transistor makes 100n RES PB3 PB4 GND 100mA
LDR
BC547
a suitable power driver for switching exter-
1k
nal loads. It gives the relatively lightweight
BC337
microcontroller port more muscle. A popu- START

lar choice for this task is the BC337, which

can switch up to 800 mA. The figure shows
a time clock circuit where the current that Figure 6. A twilight switch.
must be switched by the microcontroller is ‚Timer 60 s
less than 5 mA. The transistor amplifies the $regfile = „attiny13.dat“
port current enough to switch an incandes- $crystal = 1200000 threshold of approximately 0.6 V. This value
cent lamp. It also provides level shifting, Config Portb.4 = Output applies to all silicon transistors and results
since the microcontroller operates at 5 V Portb.3 = 1 from the well known diode characteristic
and the lamp operates at 12 V. ‚Pullup curve.
Try out this circuit with various light levels
The small BASCOM example program Do to see how it behaves. The LED is switched
implements a time switch. The timeout Do off when the light level at the sensor is high
(1 minute) starts counting down after the Loop Until Pinb.3 = 0 and switched on when the light level is low.
button is pressed. Unlike the analogue Portb.4 = 1 You should see fairly abrupt switching at a
certain threshold light level. The range of
circuit in Figure 5 of the main text, press- Waitms 60000
light levels for which the transistor is in the
ing the button again during the timeout Portb.4 = 0
partially conducting state is small.
interval does not prolong the timeout. How Loop
should the code be modified to enable Darlington circuit
retriggering? End The gains of a pair of transistors can be mul-
tiplied by using the amplified current from
the first transistor as the base current for
The circuit shown in Figure 5 has a 100 µF time, but the current drops to such a low the second transistor, where it is further
electrolytic capacitor serving as a stor- level that the light is no longer visible. amplified (see Figure 7). If each of these
age capacitor. It charges quickly when you If you prefer to implement a time switch transistors has a gain of 300, the Darlington
press the pushbutton, and after the button with a microcontroller, see the ‘Microcon- pair has a gain of 90,000. This circuit can be
is released it supplies a base current to the troller time switch’ inset. driven into full conduction with a base lead
transistor. The high resistance of the base resistance of 10 MΩ, so it can be used effec-
resistor results in a time constant of around Twilight switch tively as a touch switch with two bare wires
10 seconds. After this interval the base cur- In the circuit shown in Figure 6 we use a touched by two fingers. Moistening your
rent is no longer strong enough to drive the light dependent resistor (LDR) as a light
transistor into full conduction. sensor. This component has a light-sensi-
The time constant of an RC network is tive resistive layer made from cadmium
the time required for the capacitor to dis- sulphide (CdS). Its resistance depends on
charge to the point where its voltage is a the intensity of the incident light, ranging
100k

factor of 1/e (1/2.718…) of the initial volt- from approximately 100 Ω in full sunlight
age (36.8%). to over 1 MΩ in the dark. The resistance
1k

at an illumination level of around 1000 lux

The time constant can be calculated using (equivalent to a well illuminated workplace) 9V
a simple formula: is approximately 1 kΩ.
Time constant = resistance × capacitance The combination of the variable resistance
t = R × C of the LDR and the fixed resistance of the BC547
t = 100 kΩ × 100 µF 100 kΩ resistor forms a voltage divider.
BC547
t = 10 s The transistor is cut off when the voltage
between the base and the emitter (UBE),
As it happens, you can still detect a faint which is taken from the voltage divider
light after one minute. The LED actually junction, is too low. In simplified terms,
continues to emit light for a relatively long we can say that this circuit has a switching Figure 7. A Darlington pair.

50 02-2012 elektor
 COURSE

100k Quiz
The following circuit is built around a pair of

1k
transistors with opposite polarity (NPN and
9V
PNP). This is what is called a complemen-
tary Darlington circuit.

1k
BC547

BC547 1) How would you classify the 9V

BC547
operation of this circuit?
A) A useless circuit;
the LED will never light up BC557B
10M
B) Touching the contact
Figure 8. A triple Darlington. switches the LED off BC547B
1u
C) A touch switch with time delay

fingers is no longer necessary; even dry skin 2) What current gain can you expect?
allows enough current to flow to drive the
D) Approximately 100,000
circuit fully on. The additional 100 kΩ resis-
tor protects the transistors against exces- E) Approximately 5,000
sive base current, which would otherwise F) Approximately 900
flow if the two wires were shorted together.
An extension of the Darlington circuit to 3) What are the potential advantages of a complementary Darlington circuit
three transistors (Figure 8) can be used for compared with a normal Darlington circuit with two NPN transistors?
interesting experiments with static charge G) Higher current gain
detection. To see this, try sliding you feet
H) Lower input voltage
on the floor while touching the base lead
of this Darlington circuit with one finger. I) Lower collector–emitter voltage in the fully on state
Depending on the nature of the floor and
the material of your shoe soles, this will pro- If you send us the correct answers, you have a chance of winning a
duce more or less strong charge displace-
Minty Geek Electronics 101 Kit.
ments that are made visible by flickering of
the LED. In many cases simply approaching Send you answer code (composed of a series of three letters corresponding to your select-
the input terminal without actually touch- ed answers) by e-mail to [email protected].
ing it is enough to cause the LED to light up. Please enter only the answer code in the Subject line of your email.
The deadline for sending answers is February 28, 2012.
Using a LED as a photodiode
In addition to emitting light, LEDs can be All decisions are final. Employees of the publishing companies forming part of the Elektor International Media group
used as sensors for ambient light. In princi- of companies and their family member are not eligible to participate.
ple no current flows through a diode when

it is reverse biased, but in fact you can meas- as 5 V on the data sheets, but the voltage on
ure a very small reverse current in the range the LED in our circuit is approximately 8 V.
of a few nanoamperes, which is low enough In fact most red, yellow and green LEDs can
to be ignored in most cases. However, the withstand significantly higher reverse volt-
100k

high gain of the Darlington circuit allows ages before entering the breakdown region,
1k

you to perform experiments with extremely although the reverse breakdown voltages
low currents such as this. For instance, the of white and blue LEDs are very low. In any
9V
reverse current of an LED depends on the case, the 100 kΩ resistor protects the LED
light level, which means that an LED acts as against serious damage.
a sort of photodiode. We can use our Dar-
BC547 lington circuit to amplify the extremely No matter whether you are a beginner or
small reverse current to the level needed an old hand, you should now have a look
BC547
to light up the second LED. In such exper- at our Quiz in the inset. If you send us the
iments you should bear in mind that the right answers by e-mail, you have a chance
rated reverse voltage of an LED is much less of winning an Elektor voucher.
than that of a normal diode. The maximum
Figure 9. Amplifying the reverse current of reverse voltage of LEDs is usually specified (120002-I)
an LED.

elektor 02-2012 51