ABSTRACT
This chapter covers solid-state power amplifiers design. Solid-state power amplifiers have the advantage over vacuum tube power amplifiers in terms of reduced size, weight, and heat dissipation. These make solid-state power amplifiers a favorable choice for high current and high power applications. In this chapter, several solid-state power amplifiers of the early days are first discussed. Then modern designs are progressively covered in the remainder of the chapter. Various types of input stage, voltage amplifier stage (VAS), and output stage are fully covered. They include cascode differential amplifiers and complementary cascode amplifiers for the input stage; complementary common emitter amplifiers, complementary cascode amplifiers, and complementary differential amplifiers for VAS; double complementary emitter follower, triple complementary emitter follower, and diamond buffer amplifiers for the output stage. The operation principles for slew rate, VBE multiplier, over current protection are discussed. The pros and cons of choosing power BJTs and MOSFETs are given. Several potential amplifier configurations that can be used to implement fully balanced power amplifiers are also given. Although this chapter is oriented towards audio application, the basic concepts and design techniques also apply to high powered linear amplifiers for industrial applications.
