Application of Complementary Transistor Pairs in Microelectronic Switching Systems,

The article discusses the application of complementary transistor pairs in switching circuits and the lower limits imposed on the performance by a deterioration of the transistor characteristics. These are a reduction in gain at lower values of the d.c. emitter current and a reduction in speed in the small current region of operation. Several multivibrator circuits with two transistors are shown and analyzed. These include a regenerative circuit, a Schmitt trigger, astable and monostable multivibrators in the basic and in the Darlington versions, and more sophisticated cascade circuits with inverters. To this category belong logic circuits such as a NAND gate with CRDTL components, a universal logic, as well as monostable, astable, and bistable multivibrators - all using complementary pnp-npn transistor pairs also in their inverter stages. Author