FIU – UPC Cooperation Agreement

Projects developed by UPC students

Course: Electronics Circuit Design

Level: Fifth semester

Project:
Design of a video amplifier.

Objectives:
Design, construct and test a video amplifier satisfying the following specifications:

- Gain: 50 V/V
- Input impedance: 50 KΩ
- Output impedance: < 50 Ω
- Load resistance: 1 KΩ, 0.5W
- Balanced output.
- Unbalanced input.
- Bandwidth; Low frequency: 30 Hz High frequency: 4 MHz
- Tolerance: ±5%

Teamwork: 2 students

Allowable equipement and components

- Transistors: NPN 3904
- Transistors: NPN 2222
- Protoboards
- Resistences: 5W, 1/4W y 1/2W
- Capacitors
- Signal generator: AC at 100mVpp - sinusoidal wave
- Oscilloscope

Project development and analysis

In order to achieve the design specifications, the following strategies were proposed.

- Three differential stages amplifier.

- Given its good frequency response characteristics, the first stage is composed by a
differential Cascode.
- The second stage is composed by a differential amplifier with adjusting gain Av.
 - The third stage is composed by a Darlington array to work with the load resistance.
Given that this stage has a unit gain, the Miller effect on the amplifier band-width is
negligible.
- When integrating the three stages, it was required to implement feedback to improve
the frequency response of the amplifier. The applied feedback has the effect of adjust
(decrease) the gain with the corresponding increase in bandwidth. Feedback was
implemented with a parallel-parallel configuration between the base of the second
stage and the emitter of the third stage.

Figure 1 shows the circuit of the final design of the video amplifier where it can be clearly
noted its three stages in cascade.

Results:

After it was designed, the circuit was simulated using PSpice. Likewise, the circuit was
constructed on a protoboard to verify experimentally its response in the time and frequency
domains.
The frequency response in Fig.2, shows a flat response with the desired bandwidth. It was
measured for a load resistance of 1 KΩ.

The frequency response of the cons umed power at the load resistance is shown in Fig. 3.
Again it can be noted the flat characteristics with the desired bandwidth.

Figure 4 shows the two students working in this project.

Conclusions :

- The benefits of feedback were experimentally verified: it was possible to increase the
bandwidth and the circuit robustness and stabilization.
- Feedback changed the value of the input and output impedances but their final values
satisfied the design specifications. Input impedance can be adjusted varying the
regenerative resistance of the first stage.
- A good polarization of BJT transistors is very important to fix the parameters of
transconductance gm and the value of rO to achieve the desired gain and frequency
response.
- The parasitic capacitances Cπ and Cµ were assumed to be of 8pF y 4pF, respectively,
according to the technical specifications of the BJT used in this project. With this, the
calculated and experimental results were close enough verifying the validity of the
theoretical analysis.
Figure 1
Schematic diagram of
circuit of video
amplifier
 Figure 2. Frequency response of video amplifier.

Figure 4 show two students working on the design and testing of the circuit.

Figure 3. Frequency response of consumed power at load resistance.

Figure 4. Students working in the project.