Radio Science Generation of short electrical pulses based on bipolar transistors

Abstract. A system for the generation of short electrical pulses based on the minority carrier charge storage and the step recovery effect of bipolar transistors is presented. Electrical pulses of about 90 ps up to 800 ps duration are generated with a maximum amplitude of approximately 7 V at 50. The bipolar transistor is driven into saturation and the base-collector and base-emitter junctions become for-ward biased. The resulting fast switch-off edge of the transis-tor’s output signal is the basis for the pulse generation. The fast switching of the transistor occurs as a result of the mi-nority carriers that have been injected and stored across the base-collector junction under forward bias conditions. If the saturated transistor is suddenly reverse biased the pn-junction will appear as a low impedance until the stored charge is de-pleted. Then the impedance will suddenly increase to its nor-mal high value and the flow of current through the junction will turn to zero, abruptly. A differentiation of the output signal of the transistor re-sults in two short pulses with opposite polarities. The differ-entiating circuit is implemented by a transmission line net-work, which mainly acts as a high pass filter. Both the transistor technology (pnp or npn) and the phase of the transfer function of the differentating circuit influence the polarity of the output pulses. The pulse duration depends on the transistor parameters as well as on the transfer func-tion of the pulse shaping network. This way of generating short electrical pulses is a new al-ternative for conventional comb generators based on step-recovery diodes (SRD). Due to the three-terminal structure of the transistor the isolation problem between the input and the output signal of the transistor network is drastically sim-plified. Furthermore the transistor is an active element in contrast to a SRD, so that its current gain can be used to min-imize the power of the driving signal