BSc Hons.

Electronics &
Telecommunications
Technology
HETT204: APPLICATIONS OF
ELECTRONIC DEVICES & CIRCUITS

Mr P Dangare
 Equivalent circuit of a transistor
• The performance of any kind of transistor circuit can be
analysed by:
a) deriving the constants of a network which has behaviour
similar to that of the transistor.
b) applying Kirchhoff's laws or other network theorems to this
equivalent circuit to calculate the performance of the circuit.
• A number of equivalent networks for a transistor have been
suggested and several different parameters for expressing
transistor properties have been developed.
• these include the:
h or hybrid parameters, and
the r parameters.
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 BJT Small Signal ‘h’ Parameters
• used to define the operation of a transistor under
small signal conditions.
• Note: small signal means that any signal change is
occurring over the linear (active) region of the
transistor's characteristics.
• The symbol h stands for hybrid or mixture.
– so called because the parameters consist of a mixture of
current and voltage ratios, input resistance and output
conductance.

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• The transistor can be represented as a two-port network:
– i.e. a black box with two input and two output terminals

• In this scheme:
Ii = small signal input current;
I0 = small signal output current;
Vi = small signal input voltage
Vo = small signal output voltage.
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 For a common emitter amplifier:

Note: Lower case subscripts are used to indicate that the

quantities are small signal changes in voltages and currents.

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• Let us now assume that we know Ii and Vo.
• We can express Vi and Io in terms of Ii and Vo:

Vi f ( I i , Vo ) and Io f ( I i ,Vo )

• Since we have a linear model of the transistor we can write the

following for small changes in Ii and Vo:
Vi Vi Io Io
dVi dI i dVo dI o dI i dVo
Ii Vo
Vo Ii
Ii Vo
Vo Ii

• The partial derivatives are called the hybrid (or h) parameters

so that we can write:

dVi hi dI i hr dVo dI o h f dI i ho dVo

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• There are four h parameters related to the BJT:
– hi = small signal input resistance (in ohms);
– hf = small signal forward current transfer ratio;
– hr = small signal reverse voltage ratio;
– ho = small signal output conductance (in Siemens).
• With reference to the two-port network the h parameters can be
defined with respect to the input and output signals:

Io Vi Vi Io
hf hi hr ho
Ii Vo
Ii Vo
Vo Ii
Vo Ii

NOTE: Vo and Ii are held constant at their d.c. bias levels.

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• For the CE amplifier, the h parameters become:

Ic Vbe
h fe hre
Ib Vce
Vce Ib

Vbe Ic
hie hoe
Ib Vce Ib
Vce

• The letter h indicates hybrid parameter,

• the first subscript indicates the term that is being considered,
i.e. i = input, f = forward, etc
• the second subscript indicates the mode of connection,
i.e. e = common emitter mode, b = common base mode, etc.

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 Parameter Common Common Commo
emitter base n
collector
Small signal forward hfe = 100 hfb = 0.99 hfc = 101
current gain (hf)
Small signal input hie = 5 k hib = 50 hic = 5 k
impedance (hi)
Small signal reverse hre = 10 ×10-4 hrb = 10 ×10-4 hrc = 1
voltage ratio(hr)
Small signal output hoe = 25 S hob = 1 S hoc = 25 S
conductance (ho)

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• Using these small signal h parameters the BJT can be
considered as a current generator controlled by the current
flowing in an input resistance hie.
• Thus, the CE amplifier can be represented by the equivalent
circuit below.

• We can calculate the voltage and current gain, and the i/p &
o/p impedance of a CE amp using this model.
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