COMMON COLLECTOR AMPLIFIER

In electronics, a common-collector (also known as an emitter follower or voltage follower)amplifier is one of three basic single-stage bipolar junction transistor (BJT) amplifier topologies, typically used as a voltage buffer. In this circuit the base terminal of the transistor serves as the input, the emitter the output, and the collector is common to both (for example, it may be tied to ground reference or a power supply rail), hence its name. The analogous field-effect transistor circuit is thecommon-drain amplifier.

Applications

Voltage buffer

The common collector circuit can be shown to have a voltage gain of almost unity. Intuitively, this behavior is understood by realizing that the base-emitter voltage in the bipolar transistor is very insensitive to bias changes, so any change in base voltage is transmitted (to good approximation) directly to the emitter. Hence the name, emitter follower. Mathematically, the gain is:

Therefore a small voltage change on the input terminal will be replicated at the output (depending slightly on the transistor's gain and the value of the load resistance; see gain formula below). This circuit is useful because it has a large input impedance, so it will not load down the previous circuit:

and a small output impedance, so it can drive low-resistance loads:

(Typically, the emitter resistor is significantly larger and can be removed from the equation):

This allows a source with a large output impedance to drive a small load impedance; it functions as a voltage buffer.

In other words, the circuit has current gain (which depends largely on the h_FE of the transistor) instead of voltage gain. A small change to the input current results in much larger change in the output current supplied to the output load.

One aspect of buffer action is transformation of impedances. For example, the Thévenin resistance of a combination of a voltage follower driven by a voltage source with high Thevenin resistance is reduced to only the output resistance of the voltage follower, a small resistance. That resistance reduction makes the combination a more ideal voltage source. Conversely, a voltage follower inserted between a small load resistance and a driving stage presents a large load to the driving stage, an advantage in coupling a voltage signal to a small load.

Power amplifier

This configuration is commonly used in the output stages of class-B and class-AB amplifier — the base circuit is modified to operate the transistor in class-B or AB mode. In class-A mode, sometimes an active current source is used instead of R_E to improve linearity and/or efficiency.

Characteristics

At low frequencies and using a simplified hybrid-pi model, the following small-signal characteristics can be derived. (Parameter and the parallel lines indicate components in parallel.)

	Definition	Expression	Approximate expression	Conditions
Current gain
Voltage gain
Input resistance
Output resistance

Where is the Thévenin equivalent source resistance.

Derivations

Figure 4 shows a low-frequency hybrid-pi model for the circuit of Figure 2. Using Ohm's law various currents have been determined and these results are shown on the diagram. Applying Kirchhoff's current law at the emitter one finds: Define the following resistance values: Then collecting terms the voltage gain is found as: From this result the gain approaches unity (as expected for a buffer amplifier) if the resistance ratio in the denominator is small. This ratio decreases with larger values of current gain β and with larger vales of R_E. The input resistance is found as:

The transistor output resistance r_O ordinarily is large compared to the load R_L and therefore R_Ldominates R_E. From this result, the input resistance of the amplifier is much larger than the output load resistance R_L for large current gain β. That is, placing the amplifier between the load and the source presents a larger load to the source than direct coupling to R_L, which results in less signal attenuation in the source impedance R_S as a consequence of voltage division.

Figure 5 shows the small-signal circuit of Figure 4 with the input short-circuited and a test current placed at its output. The output resistance is found using this circuit as:

Using Ohm's law, various currents have been found, as indicated on the diagram. Collecting the terms for the base current, the base current is found as: where R_E is defined above. Using this value for base current, Ohm's law provides v_x as: Substituting for the base current, and collecting terms, where || denotes a parallel connection and R is defined above. Because R generally is a small resistance when the current gain β is large, R dominates the output impedance which therefore also is small. A small output impedance means the series combination of the original voltage source and the voltage follower presents a Thévenin voltage source with a lower Thévenin resistance at its output node; that is, the combination of voltage source with voltage follower makes a more ideal voltage source than the original one.