EEE 52: Electronic Circuits Laboratory I

Project: Multi-stage Amplifier with Adjustable Gain

1 Objective
In the previous laboratory exercises, you have seen one very common application of analog circuits: audio processing.
However, until now, the labs have focused primarily on characterizing circuits. You have been asked to analyze, build, and
characterize a number of different amplifiers and biasing circuits, but only a small amount of design work (e.g. picking
resistors or bias voltages) aside from the guided DP. For this project, you will design, build, and analyze your own
amplifier, capable of amplifying a small-amplitude signal and driving a low-impedance speaker. You have the freedom to
design an amplifier from the ground up: choosing and designing the topology, biasing, and amplifier stages.
The most important aspect of this lab is not simply getting your amplifier to work. The crucial component of this
project is the design and analysis of the amplifier, showing your understanding of the material. You will need to justify
the choices you make in your design both qualitatively and quantitatively in a report due at the end of the semester. A
quality report (not necessarily a long write-up) with correct, relevant, and insightful analysis will be required to obtain
full credit for the project.

2 Materials
The materials for this project will vary based on your implementation. The only restriction will be on the type of
transistor that you may use.
• You may use as many 2N3904/2N4401 NPN BJTs and 2N3906/2N4403 PNP BJTs, and resistors that you need for
your design (within reason).
• You are allowed to have two (2) potentiometers in your circuit.
• You are allowed to use five (5) capacitors for the whole circuit. Two (2) of these capacitors must be for AC coupling
(DC blocking) the input and output signals from a 50Ω signal generator and to the speaker, respectively.

• You are not allowed to use diodes in this exercise. Use diode-connected transistors instead, if needed.
• You are only allowed to use a single power supply of 9V to ground. You are not allowed to use any DC power
supply to bias your circuits aside from providing the power rails.
• You cannot use any op-amps or similar integrated devices in your amplifier.

3 Guidelines and Specifications

Be sure to read the following guidelines before beginning your design. Any designs not meeting these guidelines will not
receive full credit. You must show your working design as part of your score on the project.

• You are only allowed to use the materials mentioned above.

• The input is a 20mV pp sinusoidal signal from a 50Ω signal generator. The input signal frequency range is from
500Hz to 20kHz.
• You must have some type of gain adjust control using only a SINGLE POTENTIOMETER in the design. You
must be able to adjust the gain from 50 to 250 for the whole input frequency range.

– NO potentiometer should be directly connected on the input or output.

– The other potentiometer cannot be used for gain adjustments. This potentiometer cannot be adjusted in the
whole period of checking.
• The output must drive and will be measured from an 8Ω speaker.

• There should be no clipping and minimal distortion on the output waveform at the speaker.
• You are NOT allowed to use any operational amplifiers, except to invert the input signal for use with a differential
amplifier (if you decide to make your amplifier differential). For this case, the input signal from the signal generator
will be set to 10mV pp so that the differential input signal will be 20mV pp.

• You MUST use a Class AB power amplifier for the last (driver) amplifier stage.
• You are to submit a documentation for the design project.
 • Upon submission of the documentation, each students should email the instructor a peer and self evaluation. The
student should give an integer grade for each member of the group, including himself, ranging from from 0 to 10.
The evaluation should also include 1) the work done by each member, and 2) an explanation why such grades were
given. The evaluation should be 200- to 500-words long.

4 Documentation
A documentation per group must be submitted via email. The following guidelines must be followed in your report for
full credit.

• The report should be written in IEEE format.

• Include a diagram of your circuit including values for all resistors, capacitors, and voltage sources (which should
only include your voltage rails).
• Justify your topologies used and their order in the cascade. Explain why you chose the stages as you did, why you
biased them like you did, etc.
• An explanation on how the class AB amplifier works, including expressions for the 2-port parameters (gain, input
impedance, output impedance) that can be used or ar used in the design process.
• Show hand calculations for the voltages and currents in each stage of your circuit. Include also the final and
measured values of these voltages and currents and explain the changes (source of difference or possibly why it was
purposely changed in the hardware). Summarize the calculated/theoretical values and the measured/actual values
in a table.
• Either 1) show hand calculations for the overall 2-port parameters of the whole amplifier or 2) indicate your target
2-port parameter values and explain how they were achieved. The two 2-port parameters should include the overall
gain (maximum), input impedance, and output impedance.
• Bandwidth of the amplifier (indicate lower and upper cutoff). Measurement should be done when the gain control
is set at max gain without clipping.
• Determine and indicate the actual total power consumption of your amplifier without an input signal.

• Include a SPICE netlist or a SIMetrix schematic of your amplifier and simulation results (voltage gain, Bode plots,
power, etc.). Compare this with your measurements. Give reasons why your simulation does not match your
measurements, if they do not match.

5 Grading
The whole project will be worth 350 points. Late submission for each of the milestones identified below and the doc-
umentation will be given a 5-point deduction per week late. There will be no smaller deductions with a per-day basis.
A maximum of 15-point deduction can be given for each project component, i.e. the deductions on each component are
independent of each other and does not affect the deadlines for each other. A component that is passed more than 3
weeks late will still be given a 15-point deduction.

Milestones
Milestone 1: Simulation for the whole circuit with speaker load and with full specifications (50 points)
• Deadline: April 22/24

Milestone 2: Class AB amplifier circuit (50 points)

• Deadline: April 29/May 1
• Circuit must be able to deliver the full swing of at least 5V pp to the speaker without clipping and minimal distortion
from an input of at most 5.5V pp from the signal generator

Milestone 3: Complete circuit implementation and with full specifications (150 points)
• Deadline: May 6/8

Documenation (100 points)

• Deadline: May 13/15
To get INC grade
• If your total score from all submitted output including DP milestones (assuming zero for unsubmitted/unfinished
requirements) is < 60%, the student receives a failing grade (5.0)
• If your total score from all submitted output including DP milestones (assuming zero for unsubmitted/unfinished
requirements) is ≥ 60% and the DP minimum specs are not met, the student receives a grade of INC.
• If your total score from all submitted output including DP milestones (assuming zero for unsubmitted/unfinished
requirements) is ≥ 60% and the DP minimum specs are met, the student receives a passing grade.

Minimum Specifications
• Minimum specs to be given a passing grade (not INC) or to complete an INC is to have an adjustable gain from 50
to 120 without distortion from 500 Hz to 20 kHz.

6 Hints
6.1 General Hints
• Knowing the desired gain for a given load, you should be able to estimate gain and output impedance estimates for
your amplifier. You can use these estimates to decide on a topology.

• One of your first debugging steps should be to test the region of operation of your transistors with a digital
multi-meter.
• Test your amplifier stages independently if you are having trouble locating a problem.
• If the output DC level of a stage is too high/low to bias the input for the next stage, consider switching the transistor
in the next stage to one of the opposite doping, i.e. if the voltage is too high for the NPN input transistor of the
second stage, try switching it to a PNP. Make sure to modify all your other components accordingly.
• For the gain adjust control, be careful as to where you put it. In many first-time designs, tuning a badly placed
gain adjust control potentiometer can result in a shift in the DC level, potentially putting transistors out of the
active region.

6.2 BJT Hints

• When using BJTs, make sure that you are using a matching pair of NPN and PNP BJTs. NPN and PNP BJTs
with the same prefix are better matched than BJTs with different ones. When using the BJTs for a differential
amplifier, double check that the currents flowing through both branches are roughly equal.

• The 2N4401 and 2N4403 are much better matched. However, be careful when attempting to build a cascode using
these transistors. Because of their strong temperature dependence, a breeze is enough to knock all your transistors
out of the active region. The output DC level of your cascode will also vary significantly, so it may be difficult to
avoid clipping. Adding a degeneration resistor here will help.
• Be wary that the input impedance of a BJT is not infinite, and decreases as you increase the collector current.
Emitter degeneration will help increase this, but will decrease gain.

6.3 Common-collector Hints

• Remember that you are attempting to drive a speaker with an impedance of 8Ω. So, think about how much current
you will need in your output stage in order to deliver a sizable voltage across the speaker.
• For BJT-based designs, again be careful about input impedance. If you are experiencing a decrease in gain from
your gain stage when you attach your speaker (i.e. lose gain from the output of your gain stage), it may be that
the input impedance to the common-collector is not high enough.
• If you are seeing a lot of noise when you hook up the speaker, it is often due to the fact that your transistor may
not be able to deliver enough power needed to drive the load. Consider putting 2 or more BJTs in parallel in your
common-collector stage to help deliver more power.
• Since this stage will have high current, you may notice some resistors/transistors heating up. If this happens, you
may wish to put more components in parallel to dissipate heat. For example, instead of using a 50Ω resistor, use
two 100Ω resistors in parallel.