We’ve previously remarked upon a generation lucky enough to be well-versed in microcontrollers and computersised electronics through being brought up on the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi but unlucky enough to have missed out on basic electronics such as how to bias a transistor, and to address that gap we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing.

All the circuits we worked with in the previous article had the transistor’s emitter taken to ground, took their input from the base, and their output from the collector. This configuration, called a Common Emitter amplifier is probably the most common, but it is far from the only way to use a transistor. Once you have set up the bias voltage as we described to the point at which the transistor is in its linear region, there are several other ways in which the device can be used as an amplifier. The subject of this article is one of these configurations, so described because it takes the transistor’s base to the ground instead of the emitter, as a Common Base amplifier. Continue reading “Biasing That Transistor: The Common Base Amplifier” →