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Role Of Emitter (By Pass) Capacitor

What is the importance of Bypass capacitor of Common-emitter amplifier? Will the gain be reduced when it
is removed?

analog power-electronics

asked Mar 12 '13 at 15:26

Ali Khan
273 4 7 17

3 You should be more clear what exactly you are asking. "Bypass" capacitor is a rather vague term. We
can't know what you think it means and how exactly it relates to whatever common emitter amplifier
you have in mind. SHOW A SCHEMATIC. Olin Lathrop Mar 12 '13 at 18:03

For others wondering about schematic: See google images for "Common-emitter amplifier". Note
many schematics with emitter cap, often labelled CE. gwideman Mar 12 '13 at 21:01

1 @gwideman There are an infinite number of permutations and combinations. If the OP cannot provide
a specific example, a specific answer cannot be provided. Adam Lawrence Mar 12 '13 at 21:14

@ Madmanguruman The term ""Common emitter amplifier" is pretty unambiguous, as is the term
"emitter bypass capacitor". Can you find any examples where Phil's answer would not be correct?
Perhaps not everyone is familiar with common emitter amp, and could become familiar thanks to a
schematic. But so far as being ambiguous per se, the question is pretty clear. gwideman Mar 12 '13 at
22:42

3 How is it vague? How can you interpret the question in more than one way? Previous commenters
thought that "bypass cap" was ambiguous, yet OP specifies emitter bypass cap, right in the title. He
uses standard terminology regarding a standard transistor configuration, which he specified by its
standard name. gwideman Mar 13 '13 at 3:23

2 Answers

Usually, this capacitor is in parallel with a resistor:

In a common-emitter amplifier, any impedance between the emitter and ground (

R e and C e) serves to reduce the gain of the amplifier: it is a form of negative
feedback. By increasing the negative feedback and decreasing the gain, we can
make variations in transistors less significant. Perhaps most relevant to this point,
by adding R e we make the bias current more dependent on the resistors (which are
easy to control) and less dependent on the gain of the transistor (which varies
over a large range, even among transistors of the same model).

But what if we still want high gain? Because a capacitor presents an impedance
that decreases with frequency, putting C e in parallel with R e serves to decrease the
negative feedback, and thus increase the gain, at high frequencies. Effectively,
high-frequency signals can bypass the emitter resistor, through the capacitor. Yet,
to DC, the capacitor appears as an open circuit, so adding the capacitor does not
affect the DC bias current. Thus, if we are interested in amplifying AC signals only,
this capacitor allows us to have a stable DC bias current while maintaining high
gain for our signals of interest.

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