POWER ELECTRONICS HANDBOOK, 3rd Edition

3

Power Bipolar Transistors

Marcelo Godoy Simoes, Ph.D.

Engineering Division, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, USA

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Basic Structure and Operation

3.3 Static Characteristics

3.4 Dynamic Switching Characteristics

3.5 Transistor Base Drive Applications

3.6 SPICE Simulation of Bipolar Junction Transistors

3.7 BJT Applications

    Further Reading

3.1 Introduction

The first transistor was discovered in 1948 by a team of physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and soon became a semiconductor device of major importance. Before the transistor, amplification was achieved only with vacuum tubes. Even though there are now integrated circuits with millions of transistors, the flow and control of all the electrical energy ...