Name: How a transistor works
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T16:58:29.000Z
Duration: 11 min 23 s
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Adverbs of degree

Transistor which is a pretty common kind of transistor and this particular one is an nPN

Basic passive voice

transistor and so this transistor is made up of three layers of

and maybe maybe you can guess what it means for it to be an nPN transistor these two layers of Silicon are N-Type and

And if you haven't watched my previous video where I where I go into quite a bit of detail about what these n-type and P-type

Silicon is you should definitely go [back] and watch that otherwise the rest of this isn't going to make a whole time sense and

So this is an NPN transistor, and they make Pnp transistors as well

But [well] we'll just talk about nPN for now, and so this here is the circuit diagram for a transistor

And it's got the three leads coming off of it. There's a

Emitter a base and a collector, and if you look at the actual physical transistor there's three leads coming off

And this is the emitter the middle one is the base and this is the collector although

That's not really standardized, but in this particular case. That's how it how it works and

What a transistor does is it is a current controlled switch

And so what that means is that if we establish a a small current from the base to the emitter in this direction?

The transistor will switch on and it will allow a very large current to flow from the Collector to the emitter

And sometimes you can also use this as an amplifier because [the] small current is amplified into a large current flow here

And so first off there's there's actually something kind of confusing about the way this this diagram is drawn with this arrow like this which

A circuit diagram and a lot of times a lot of engineers like to think about positive current flow which [is] current flowing from positive

when in reality it's the electrons that flow from negative to positive and and

it doesn't really matter which which convention we use because

You know as long as there's current flowing in [one] direction the other the current will have the same effect

But when we when we start to actually look at what's going on inside the transistor

It's it's easier to think of this in terms of the direction the electrons are flowing instead of the conventional Direction

And so so really what's going on in here even though the arrows pointing this way

And we think of current flowing that way in reality the electrons are flowing from the emitter to the base

And so it'll [just] turn all this around for for this discussion here

To kind [of] restate what it is that the transistor does?

In terms of electron flow is that a small

flow of Electrons from the emitter to the Base will turn the

Transistor on and allow a large flow of Electrons from the emitter to the collector

so if we look at it in in this in this scenario

This piece of N-type material might be might be the emitter

then this this N-type material over here is the collector and

So what were what we're going to do with the transistor is that?

We're going to try to put a bunch of electrons in over on this side

And we want to get them out over on this side

Then we're not going to get that current flow and in order to turn the transistor on

What we want to do is get a small current flowing through the emitter and out the base like this and once we get that

That small current flowing then the transistor will turn on will have a large amount of current able to flow all the way through it

So let's redraw this so we can we can kind of get a closer look at what's really going on in here

So if we take a closer look at what's going on in here. We've got the emitter here

Which is N-Type material and so we have these extra electrons that are in here that are free to kind of move around

We've got the base. Which is P-type material, so we have these these holes that are in here that are free to move around

And then the collector is is also n-type and so there's electrons that are free to move around

But at each of these Pn junctions remember we we have this depletion region

Which [I've] kind of exaggerated here. We have this depletion region

Electrons from the N-Type Material are going to fill in some of the holes and the P-type material and kind of neutralize each other

So there are no charge carriers in these in these depletion regions in here, and so what happens is if [we] want to

Try to get a current to flow through this thing you know maybe we'll hook up

Let me let me move up here if we hook up a [battery] here

The the whole transistor from the emitter to the collector

And so this is the negative terminal this is the positive terminal and we're going to be thinking about Electron flow here

The negative terminal of the battery is going to kind of inject some some electrons into here

[you] know this is going to become a little bit more or a little bit negatively charged

So there's going to be a few more electrons that enter this area and some of them might even kind of creep into this

Depletion region a bit if we get enough electrons to come in here, but [it] but we don't have a current flow here

We're not we're not you know drawing electrons out of the base and adding more holes here

so we're not we're not going to see that Diode action here because we don't have a

you know that point six volt differential between the

So so we might have some [more] electrons coming in here

But nothing nothing crazy is going to happen here at the same time

you know some of the electrons that are in the collector are going to be attracted towards the positive terminal of battery and so [we'll]

Electrons that are going to get kind of attracted to the battery so really nothing nothing too exciting has happened here yet

No, no current is flowing that's for sure, but now what happens when we try to turn on the transistor

So we try to turn on the transistor what we're going to do is we're going to try to apply a small current

from the emitter to the base and so we might have

a you know a small battery down here that we connect to the across the emitter and the base and

So now if we [just] look at the emitter and the base it looks like we have we have a diode and we've we were

Trying to get current to flow through it in the in the forward direction what we call forward biasing this diode

And so what's going to happen is the same thing that we saw when we looked at the the diode in in the previous video

Electrons are going to are going to come into the emitter here

And we're also going to draw electrons out of the base and so we draw electrons out of the base

We're adding holes here [too] to the base

And as long as we get about 0.6 or 0.7 volts of current flowing in this [direction]

[0.7] volts, I think for for most transistors

we're going to start actually getting getting current flow and

So these electrons are going to get you know close enough here that this depletion this depletion region will will

Will shrink to the point where we now have charge carriers all the way through here

And so we can carry a charge all the way through so now this is this is where things get really interesting

So we've got a bunch of things going on [here] right so first we've got lots of electrons entering the the emitter [over] here from

You know from this battery here, but also we've got electrons entering from this battery here

second thing that's going on is the the emitter part of the of the

Transistor the way, they manufacture these is is the emitter is really heavily doped

So there's there's a relatively higher concentration of those phosphorous atoms here