As a companion post to the GeminiPS I thought I'd throw the amplifier circuit out there too...

It's not something you'd have any reason to built today I think, but some of the ideas are worth revisiting.

The output stage is what is normally referred to as a complimentary Sziklai pair. The LTSpice circuit below uses the same output, but with the diamond buffer type bias, with it all scaled down to headphone-amplifier voltages and loads. It would be interesting to compare it against i.e. the conventional diamond buffer used in the Sapphire headphone amp. Maybe I'll get around to it. The simulation shows a bit more transient peaking than the straight diamond buffer, ideally there could be some way of adding compensation / reducing the bandwidth to more reasonable levels.

Part of a series.

The GeminiPS is another discrete series voltage regulator, with a Zener reference and bipolar pass transistor. It's an old circuit, published in Practical Electronics in 1970-71, and written by D.S. Gibbs and I.M. Shaw. I happen to have a reprint, but there's a nice overview here.

For reference it might be worth checking back to the two transistor regulator. The GeminiPS circuit is related in the sense that it is a more sophisticated take on the same basic principle. With just a handful of components we have a stabilized, 30 W output with soft turn on and short circuit protection. The circuit can be scaled up and down relatively easily, and the complimentary (negative output) version is an easy modification.

The pass transistor (TR2/3, Q2/3) is between the circuit common and the rectifier anodes. This may seem odd, but it was relatively common back in the day when high voltage transistors were both expensive and rare. The...

Part of a series.

I've been meaning to take up shunt regulators for some time. I've never got around to building one myself to try, so I'll have to make do by playing in simulation.

Today's circuit is the shunt analog of the Z-reg series regulator: no feedback, Zener reference, single transistor regulation. The output impedance and ripple rejection-characteristics are similar too, with about 40 dB of RR and an output impedance of just a few ohms. It can be built equivalently from either an pnp or pnp transistor. (See attached LTSpice .asc files.)

The difference between shunt and series regulation can best be explained by considering the upstream power supply: In a series regulator an increase in current demand by the load causes the regulator to increase the current to compensate. In a shunt regulator an increase in current demand by the load causes the regulator to decrease the shunt current to balance, so there is no net change in current flowing...

Case report:

A set of Sapphire boards gave the proper V+, V- voltages out of the Z-reg, providing about 10.5 and -10.5 to op amp power pins. The output offsets were unusually high however, apparently at about 2 V in one board, and somewhat less in the other. Typically the offsets are in the order of +/-15 mV.

Changing out transistors and op amps did not help, and to all inspection the passive components were installed correctly and working properly. The offset voltages were extremely temperature sensitive. Measurements for the various circuit voltages were just screwy enough to be inconclusive.

I could ask for no more tests, so requested the boards be sent back to me. I found the circuit basically worked as expected, but the offsets were indeed high on both boards, though I measured 0.6 V max rather than 2 V.

***** stop here and make a guess *****

Blowing on the board through a soda straw, the offset shot up when I blew on...

Part of a series.

So you have a small handful of parts and want to build a (simple) discrete voltage regulator instead of using an IC. What to do?

For line-level audio circuits, especially op amp based (IC or discrete) preamps with high PSRR, something like the Z-reg is generally sufficient. Robust, works well, has enough ripple rejection to cut power line noise from the preamp output.

If you add just a couple more parts, however, you can add feedback to the Z-reg circuit, a simple error amplifier in the form of an additional transistor Q2, with the output-sampling voltage divider R1,R2.

The ripple rejection is not vastly superior to the circuit without the feedback unless some additional bypass capacitors are added as shown in the first version of the circuit below. The output impedance, however, improves from a few ohms to a few tenths of an ohm as a result of the feedback. Which could, in principle, be of use.

...

Part of a series.

The circuit is described here.

I'm not going to spend too much time on this one. The idea is to increase the input impedance of the pass transistor by buffering it with a jFET so it will support a high-impedance passive CRCRC filter section that generates a low noise reference voltage. The reference is defined not by a Zener or diode stack, but by a simple voltage divider. There is a LM317 pre-regulator on the front, but it is traditionally configured and works independent of the following circuit so it is omited here together with the additional transistor that speeds up the charging of the reference voltage filter capacitors.

The basic problem is that lowering the noise of the reference cannot lower the output noise indefinitely. After a point the output noise is defined by the performance of the pass transistor instead.

As you can see from the simulation, the circuit has the same ripple rejection as the filtered zener-referenced one-transistor regulator,...

Part of a series.

This circuit is from this page by Kean Token, also referenced in his recent blog post.

Two versions are presented, one with all the protection diodes and a simplified version with extraneous components removed.

LTSpice simulation shows so-so performance into a light load, with about 70 dB of ripple rejection and a fairly high output impedance, but the drop out voltage is respectably low and we must factor in - coming directly from the Jung Super Regulator - that this is just a two transistor circuit, with no error amplifier to provide feedback.

As a frame of reference, it is quite similar in performance to the Z-reg we looked at back in part III.

The k-multipler is of a class of voltage regulators where the output is referred to the input voltage, rather than to ground. It provides "X volts less than the input", rather than the traditional regulator which provides "X volts above zero"....

In the next part of the series, I'll be presenting various published regulator circuits.

Today we have the "Jung Super Regulator" (2000 version) on deck, thanks to Tangentsoft's excellent write-up.

In translating the circuit to LTSpice, I've made some concessions. While I have kept the protection diodes so as to be consistent with the original - even if they do nothing in this simulation - the op amp, transistors, voltage regulator and reference have been substituted with working equivalents from the LTSpice libraries. I've been approximate in the resistance and capacitance values, and tuned the circuit to output 10 V at 10 mA to keep in line with the previous circuits I've uploaded.

It works though, and, under simulation at least, it works extremely well. Putting it together in LTSpice gave me a new appreciation for just how much work and refinement went into its design. Now, its an open question whether such over-the-top performance...

Part five of a series.

Last time, we'd got to a functional voltage regulator, with a pass transistor and op amp error amplifier but I cheated and used ideal voltages for the reference and op amp power supply.

This time I've sketched out a functional circuit using real parts found in the LTSpice library. I've chosen a rail-to-rail op amp to avoid problems with low voltage references. The LT1009 reference puts out 2.5 V, the op amp gain is 4, for an output of 10 V into 1 kohms.

Two versions of the circuit are included below. Voltageregulator5 has some additional RC filter stages to remove noise from the reference and op amp power supply Voltageregulator5b just takes everything straight from the input voltage. As you can see there's a fairly substantial advantage gained from judicial use of RC filtering.

So that's the end of Term 1. The basics have been covered, however briefly. I encourage you to download the LTSpice files and play...

Part 4 for a series.

At the end of Part 3 I promised to introduce feedback, and I will, but what we are really talking about here is the addition of the error amplifier, the heart of all modern series pass regulators. The error amplifier is a non-inverting DC signal amplifier, and its function is simple: amplify and buffer the reference voltage. The twist is that the amplifier output is connected to the base of the pass transistor, while the feedback connection is taken from it’s emitter. The pass element is thus placed inside the feedback loop of the error amplifier, improving the ripple rejection and output impedance of the regulator dramatically.

So here we are, the three building blocks of a voltage regulator are in place: the reference voltage, the error amplifier, and the pass device. In the LTSpice circuit I’ve cheated, deliberately, in order to make the operation easier to follow. Instead of building a practical voltage reference I’ve...