Let's go...

In the 1950s, the American researcher Sidney Darlington was experimenting with the then novel transistors. He described a circuit which magnified the gain of a single transistor significantly. As the circuit involved two transistors, it became known as the Darlington pair. George Sziklai later expanded the work.

Darlington combined two bipolar transistors in the circuit. The amplified signal from the first transistor is again amplified by a second transistor. In this way the circuit can achieve very large gains. By the simplicity of the circuit and the triumph of the transistor, Darlington pair form the basis for a variety of applications.

In this first part you get to know in ten experiments how the Darlington pair, Darlington transistors and the Sziklai pair work and their main characteristics.

The second part (Go on...) describes another five experiments. In them you learn about applications of Darlington transistors.

Let's go...and have fun...