Question about diode temperature and forward voltage

Jun 14, 2006 27 Replies

No problem. I was also bugged in the same way. Luckily, I happen to have "Modeling the Bipolar Transistor" by Ian Getreu (Tektronix, at the time) written circa 1979-1980. It's an excellent book on the BJT and covers detailed procedures in the last half of it for deriving the various parameter values from specific instrumentation and measurement procedures he discusses. That last half is actually the more valuable part of it, as I've not found any other single source discussing very specific means that one can actually set up on their bench for measuring BJT parameters up through Gummel-Poon. But it also includes this Isat equation, too, in the very first few pages.

Jon

** Learn to read - IDIOT !!

....... Phil

** Learn to READ - you Google Groping IDIOT.

AND DO NOT TOP POST !!!!

...... Phil

You are right about Is being really small .... obviously I was mistaken about trying to make If < Is. I had to go back to the books and recheck the formulas and the constants. When I did this, I found/realized that 'q' the charge on an an electron is negative (which makes sense). This factor corrects the direction of the slope for you. As many later contributors have shown the formula you started with is an approximation based on some assumptions. This is not a bad thing, it all depends on the level of accuracy you desire and the accuracy of the characterization for the diode in question.

BTW ... Somewhere in this thread someone suggests that 'k' (Boltzmans Constant) is negative but that is not shown in my textbooks.

Good luck.

Here's a page showing (in simplified form) how to estimate the temperature coefficient from the diode equation:

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Regards,

Hans

If you really wrote that, you should understand it first. Not only is the calculation plainly wrong, you also guessed this 10^-12A=Is. T means absolute temperature and is around 300K, one degree more it is 301K, That makes your coefficient positive. In case of diodes made from materials with high energy gap, the reverse biasing current Is cannot be calculated from the diode equation, due to recombination of charge carriers. Is is the reverse leakage current and proportional to T^alpha*e(-q*Vg /2kT) alpha is around 3, Vg=1.124V for silicon

ciao Ban Apricale, Italy

"Ban"

** Seems to be a classic example of a FAKE calculation.

The author knew what the *answer * ought to be and contrived his estimates values to get it.

See what happens if you make the innocent change of I test to 1mA and I sat to 1 uA ?

VOILA - the diode's tempco is suddenly 3 times smaller !!

....... Phil

Guess who is the idiot who made up this page?(look in the credits on that site) Even after reading the replies here he still recommends it. This really shows his utter ignorance and stupidity. Well the web is full of these fake specialists, reminds me of an Australian site though... :-)

ciao Ban Apricale, Italy

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