In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube (in North America), thermionic valve, or valve (elsewhere,

especially in Britain) is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify, or create an electrical signal
by controlling the movement of electrons in a low-pressure space. Some special function vacuum tubes
are filled with low-pressure gas: these are so-called soft tubes as distinct from the hard vacuum type
which have the internal gas pressure reduced as far as possible. Almost all tubes depend on the
thermionic emission of electrons.

In 1907 Lee De Forest placed a bent wire serving as a screen, later known as the "grid" electrode,
between the filament and plate electrode. As the voltage applied to the grid was varied from negative to
positive, the number of electrons flowing from the filament to the plate would vary accordingly. Thus
the grid was said to electrostatically "control" the plate current. The resulting three-electrode device
was therefore an excellent and very sensitive amplifier of voltages. DeForest called his invention the
"Audion". In 1907, DeForest filed for a three-electrode version of the Audion for use in radio
communications. The device is now known as the triode. De Forest's device was not strictly a vacuum
tube, but clearly depended for its action on ionisation of the relatively high levels of gas remaining after
evacuation. The De Forest company, in its Audion leaflets, warned against operation which might cause
the vacuum to become too hard. The Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt significantly improved on the
original triode design in 1914, while working on his sound-on-film process in Berlin, Germany. The first
true vacuum triodes were the Pliotrons developed by Irving Langmuir at the General Electric research
laboratory (Schenectady,

Tetrodes and pentodes

When triodes were first used in radio transmitters and receivers, it was found that they had a
tendency to oscillate due to parasitic anode-to-grid capacitance. Many circuits were developed to
reduce this problem (e.g. the Neutrodyne amplifier), but proved unsatisfactory over wide ranges
of frequencies. It was discovered that the addition of a second grid, located between the control
grid and the plate and called a screen grid could solve these problems. ("Screen" implies
shielding, not physical construction.) A positive voltage slightly lower than the plate voltage was
applied to it, and the screen grid was bypassed (for high frequencies) to ground with a capacitor.
This arrangement decoupled the anode and the first grid, completely eliminating the oscillation
problem. An additional side effect of this second grid is that the Miller capacitance is also
reduced, which improves gain at high frequency. This two-grid tube is called a tetrode, meaning
four active electrodes.

However, the tetrode has some new problems. In any tube, electrons strike the anode hard
enough to knock out secondary electrons. In a triode these (less energetic) electrons cannot reach
the grid or cathode, and are re-captured by the anode. But in a tetrode, they can be captured by
the second grid, reducing the plate current and the amplification of the circuit. Since secondary
electrons can outnumber the primary electrons, in the worst case, particularly when the plate
voltage dips below the screen voltage, the plate current can actually go down with increasing
plate voltage. This is negative-resistance behavior. This is the "tetrode kink" (see the reference
for a plot of this effect in the RCA-235 tetrode). Another consequence of this effect is that under
severe overload, the current collected by the screen grid can cause it to overheat and melt,
destroying the tube.

Again, the solution was to add another grid, called a suppressor grid. This third grid was biased
at either ground or cathode voltage and its negative voltage (relative to the anode)
electrostatically suppressed the secondary electrons by repelling them back toward the anode.
This three-grid tube is called a pentode, meaning five electrodes.

1. The Diode Valve

The cathode is heated to a dull red heat. This causes negatively charged electrons to leave the
surface. These liberated electrons are then accelerated by the radial electrostatic field, crossing
the vacuum to land on the (positive) anode. Electron flow is cathode to anode. If the polarity is
now reversed, i.e. the anode is made negative with respect to the cathode, no current flows. Why
not? Because electrons leaving the cathode are driven back to the cathode surface by the reversed
electrostatic field direction. Also the anode, being cold, does not emit electrons, so there is no
source of electrons for reverse current flow. The diode is therefore a device that passes current in
only one direction. It has two main applications in radio receivers:

 Rectifying Diodes are used in power supplies to convert mains alternating current (AC) to direct
current (DC) to feed the rest of the receiver circuitry.
 Detector Diodes are used to extract the audio signal from the received amplitude modulated
(AM) radio frequency (RF) signal.

2. The Triode Valve

In a triode valve, electron flow is still from cathode to anode. However, they must first pass the
grid, which is held at a negative potential with respect to the cathode and therefore tends to repel
electrons back towards the cathode. This negative grid voltage is called grid bias. So, how do
electrons get past the grid? The fact is, electrons don't just 'fall off' the cathode; they come flying
off with a wide range of velocities. The slower ones will be turned back by the grid, but the
faster ones will manage to pass through the grid into the pull of the anode. In the language of
Physics, their initial kinetic energy must be sufficient to overcome the potential barrier of the
grid. The grid acts like a tap (faucet) to control the cathode to anode flow. A small change of grid
voltage can result in a large change in anode current. This is the principle of amplification.
Triode valves have three main applications in radio:

 Triodes can amplify low level audio signals to drive headphones or loudspeakers.
 Triodes can amplify low level RF signals from an aerial, prior to diode detection (as described
above)
The Tetrode

One problem with the triode valve is the capacitance between the anode and the control grid. As
the anode signal is inverted, the effect of this capacitive coupling is to reduce gain, especially at
high frequencies. In some cases, when using reactive anode loads, this capacitive coupling can
result in instability and oscillation. The solution is to place a second grid, called a screen grid
between the control grid and the anode. This grid is held at high potential but is decoupled to
ground by a capacitor. The effect is to screen the control grid from the anode and therefore
eliminate the undesirable effects described above. Tetrodes therefore provide higher gain at high
frequencies.

The Pentode

Unfortunately, the tetrode introduced a new problem of its own. When electrons strike an anode
at high velocity, sometimes they 'dislodge' other electrons. This is called secondary emission. In
a triode, these secondary electrons are recollected by the anode, but in a tetrode, some of them
are collected instead by the (positive) screen grid. This causes a kink in the graph of anode
current vs anode voltage, in some cases even a downturn of the curve, giving a region of
negative dynamic resistance. Negative dynamic resistance results in instability or oscillation (the
dynatron effect). To counter this, a third grid is added, closer to the anode, and held at a low
potential. This has the effect of reflecting secondary electrons back to the anode, preventing their
take-up by the screen grid. This extra grid is called the suppressor grid. In terms of performance
and stability, the pentode is generally considered the 'standard' valve.