CCS: not everything that glitters is gold (Part I)

Introduction

This is the first instalment of a series of blog posts around CCS for valve circuits. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did with the experiments conducted as a result of my interest in CCS-driven circuits.

The depletion cascoded CCS

It’s been long time since I’ve done some circuit analysis and algebra, hopefully I’ve got this right. Seems to get to the expected result, so hey: I’ve done it ok.

The analysis of this circuit starts by using the T-model of the MOSFET. I’ve omitted the parasitic capacitances to simplify the analysis. I leave you the challenge to add them in though. If we look at the typical self-biased depletion FET CCS we can find the output impedance by doing the following formulae crunching:

CCS zout formulae1In summary, the output impedance looking from the source side is:

Zout\approx Rs+\left ( 1+Rs\cdot G_{m} \right )\cdot r_{o} \approx Rs\cdot G_{m}\cdot r_{o} = Rs\cdot\mu

Continue reading “CCS: not everything that glitters is gold (Part I)”