Introduction

Quasi-static curves (or characteristics) are a collection of curves describing the behavior of an electronic device in terms of voltages and currents at its terminals. An instrument useful for tracing those characteristics is called curve tracer. Several curve tracers have been fabricated, ranging from very cheap and simplistic boxes to be connected to an oscilloscope in XY mode, to professional instruments able to test devices from tiny 25 nm transistors on silicon wafers, to high voltage/high current power devices and vacuum tubes. Notable examples are the venerable Hewlett-Packard HP4145 [HP4145], on which generations of technicians have cut their teeth, or the more recent Agilent B1505A [B1505A]. A few years ago, I got a dismissed curve tracer, a Textronix 577 D1 with a 177 fixture. I repaired it recently, and I started to investigate a little the characteristics of some electronics devices in my possession. This article comes from the observations I have done in the last few months. Even if the curves do not cover all the aspects of a device (for example, high frequency behavior requires a different kind of investigation), they are a true signature of what is happening inside a device. I would like to present here a few experimental results as well as some thoughts relating the characteristics to the context on which devices are (or were) fabricated. Figure 1 gives an ensemble view of some of those we are about to get acquainted in this article. Of course, giving a complete detailed description of each device can not be in the scope of an article. Moreover, there are dozens of different device families, each of them literally counting hundreds of relatives. Some sort of arbitrary choices will therefore be done.

Fig. 1: some of the devices discussed in the article. We have ECC83, ECC82 and ECC88 miniature double triodes, a 5Y3GB rectifier, a 6080WA double power triode, 2N3055 and MJL4281A power transistors. A BC546B bipolar transistor and a

BF244C JFET on the Tek adapter. The keyboard of the laptop will not be described here, but has proven to be useful for typing this text. The highlighter has also been employed while preparing the bibliography section.

The article is organized as follows. At first, I will describe how a curve tracer works and I will give you a short description of my Tex 577. In this part, I will also focus on why knowing the curves of a device is so useful. Then I will present and comment some devices characteristics. Some sort of historical perspective being underlining all the article, I will try not to restrict only to currently used solid state semiconductor devices, but I will also give the characteristics of a few vacuum tubes. We will at first see a few rectifiers (a vacuum tube diode, a mercury low pressure rectifier, a silicon diode). Then we will concentrate on low and (relatively) high power three-terminal devices, such as triodes and transistors of different sizes. This article ends with a conclusion which summarizes all obtained results, with a special emphasis on measured small signal parameters. I must warn that some audiophiles might be disappointed: I will in fact describe some tubes, but I will never try to justify or argument about the tube sound, nor it is my aim to prove vacuum tubes are better for audio circuits.

Device curves with the Tek 577 curve tracer

The scope of this paragraph is to clarify some jargon and describe briefly what one means with device

curves and then show the Tektronix 577 D1 with a 177 text fixture. To begin with something very simple, let's
consider a semiconductor diode, called D in the schematic of Fig. 2 (a). The quasi static characteristic of a diode is the curve obtained by tracingic(t) as a function of vc(t). Quasi static simply means that one must vary v(t) to span a certain range, sufficiently slowly that all time-dependant transient of the device have enough time to complete. One might wonder why I have made a difference between the excitation voltage and vc(t), the voltage applied to the device. After all, if the ammeter used to measure current ic(t) is perfect, those two voltages are identical. On the other hand, in a more realistic situation, there will always been a small voltage drop on the ammeter and one has to be careful about its influence in the characteristics.

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Fig. 2: (a) an idealized way of tracing the characteristics of the D diode. By varying the excitation voltage v(t), the curves ic(t) versus vc(t) describe the behavior of the device. (b) the characteristics measurement setup for a NPN bipolar transistor (control through current ib). (c) the setup for a N-channel JFET (control through voltage vg).

If a three-terminal device such as a bipolar, junction field effect transistor or a triode has to be characterized, a more complex setup must be adopted, such as those shown in figures 2 (b) and (c). In fact, usually, the collector (or drain) voltage is varied and the corresponding intensity ic (respectively id) is traced. This is repeated several times by keeping the base current ib(t) (respectively vg) constant. Each new value of this parameter will give a new curve. A curve tracer is an instrument automatically repeating this procedure. To remain coherent through the paper, I will always adopt symbols defined in figure 2 (c), whose index recall terminals of bipolar and field effect transistors. Tektronix has produced several curve tracers, from the classic vacuum-tube era 570 [Tek570] to the programmable 370 [Tek370], now discontinued. I own the Tektronix 577 curve tracer shown in figure 3. It is a nice wholly analog 1970-era design, making use of split screen analog phosphor memory (D1 storage unit). This feature is very useful when tracing curves, since it avoids completely the flickering which is otherwise inevitable when the refresh rate is slow. All the screen captures shown in this article have been taken from a stored image. Then, some information was digitally superimposed to ease reading.

Fig. 3: a photograph of a Tek 577 curve tracer. This is the D1 variant, with the analog phosphor memory. Curves shown belong to a BC546B bipolar transistor. No computers or microcontrollers there. Some knobs are not the original ones, revealing the age of this machine...

The curves on the screen of the Tex 577 in figure 3 have been obtained from a BC546B NPN all-purpose silicon transistor. The vertical axis represents the collector current ic with a scale of 1mA/div., the horizontal axis is the applied collector voltage ve with a scale of 0.5V/div. The measurement is repeated 11 times, with the base current ib ranging from 0A to 20A in steps of 2A. The emitter is kept to the 0V reference. Curves of the same device will be commented in a later moment and are visible in figures 11 and 12 (with different scales). A lot of people love vintage Tektronix instruments and it is easy to find technical literature about them (user manuals, calibration procedures, schematics, etc...) I had to do several small repairs and the calibration on my 577 and I truly enjoyed the way Tektronix used to trace schematics [Tek577]. Figure 4 depicts a small part of the schematics of the 577, taken from the reference manual. Note how the relevant oscilloscope measurements are reported directly in the schematics, at some key points of the circuit. Everything is conceived to ease repair interventions. By the way, a double N-channel JFET was fried in my unit, which I replaced with two discrete BF244A's. In this case, no soldering was needed, since all active devices are socketed (single transistors included). While testing tubes for this article, a high voltage diode in the collector supply suddenly shorted. It was promptly replaced with two 1N4007 in series. An external DC adjustable power supply has been used to power up filaments. It barely managed to heat up the AX50 rectifier and almost caught fire with the 6080WA triode. After a few days of testing, my laboratory was quite a battleground...

Fig. 4: electronics can be a form of art. Behold this beautifully drawn portion of the 577 schematics, traced ages before CAD systems were available.