William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, once explained transistor-amplifiers this way:
>*”If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.”*
which seems to describe the concept but not the process.
In: 6
I often call a transistor a “voltage-controlled switch”, but that’s not really true. Transistors are voltage-controlled *resistor*. MOSFET transistors have 3 terminals: gate, source and drain. The amount of voltage at the gate terminal determines the amount of resistance between the source and drain terminal. If you connect the source terminal to a supply with a higher voltage, you can get more voltage out of the drain terminal that you supply at the gate. You generally use a additional resistor between the transistor and the supply to bias the amplifier to the range of voltages you want.
Latest Answers