Transistor Pulse Regenerative 

 Amplifiers 



By F. H. TENDICK, JR. 



(Manuscript received April 5, 1956) 



A pulse regenerative amplifier is a histate circuit which introduces gain 

 (ind pidse reshaping in a pulse transmission or digital data processing 

 system.. Frequently it is used also to retime the ptdses which constitute the 

 flow of information in such systems. The small size, r-eliahility , and low 

 power consumption of the transistor have led naturally to the use of the 

 transistor as the active element in the amplifier. It is the purpose of this 

 paper to describe some of the techniques that are pertinent to the design of 

 .synchronized regenerative amplifiers operating at a pulse repetition rate 

 of the order of one megacycle per second. An illustrative design of an amp- 

 lifier for use in a specific digital computer is presented. 



1. INTRODUCTION 



A basic building block of many modern digital data processing or 

 transmission systems is a pulse regenerative amplifier. The particular 

 high speed transistor regenerative amplifiers to be discussed in this 

 paper are intended for use in systems where the logic operations on the 

 digit pulses are performed by passive circuits and the amplifiers are 

 inserted at appropriate intervals to amplify, reshape, and retime the 

 pulses. The design of these amplifiers for any specified system involves 

 a knowledge of the environment of the amplifier in the system, a study 

 of possible functional circuits which are combined to form an amplifier 

 circuit, and the selection of a combination of these functional circuits 

 to achieve the desired amplifier performance. Although a study of the 

 functional circuits constitutes the major portion of this paper, the 

 design of an amplifier for a particular digital computfM' is presented to 

 illustrate the general design procedure. 



One important way in which these amplifiers differ from many pulse 

 amplifiers is that they must function properly under adverse conditions. 

 That is, instead of merely expecting superior performance most of the 



1085 



