Transistor Pulse Regenerative Amplifiers

A pulse regenerative amplifier is a bistate circuit which introduces gain and pulse reshaping in a pulse transmission or digital data processing system. Frequently it is used also to retime the pulses which constitute the flow of information in such systems. The sniall size, reliability, 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 pidse repetition rate of the order of one megacycle per second. An illustrative design of an amplifier for use in a specific digital computer is presented. 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 sj stem 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 computer is presented to illustrate the general design procedure.