Design Considerations for Maximum Bandwidth in Transistorized Pulse Amplifiers

Each of the transistor biasing configurations - common-emitter, common-base, and common-collector - has disadvantages which greatly limits the use of cascaded, single-transistor stages for general wide-band amplification. Careful choice of a combination of biasing configurations in a single stage permits optimum use of the advantages of each configuration while minimizing the effects of the disadvantages. Considerations leading to the design of an acceptable wide-band pulse amplifier stage are discussed. These principles have been applied to the design of a one-stage feedback amplifier, which has the following characteristics: gain = 25.8 db, rise time = 2.8 nsec, and linear amplification of either positive or negative pulses.