This gets even crazier when you want to see devices' overload characteristics and stuff. I build guitar pedals and vacuum tube sims using discrete transistor circuits. There are so many undocumented "effects" that I've learned about and used. I can say that math is great for when you are trying to nail down a specific design that requires precision. The art of using them creatively is a whole different level and it has taken me over 10 years to learn about and document a whole slew of things that aren't documented.

That definitely answers the transistor issue. Great to see this explained. Never heard about the Miller effect. Thanks for this ‘down the rabbits hole’ video.

This is gold, love the deep dives as this usually, for me at least, makes things simpler. I know people always think abstractions are better for that, I guess they are when you want to learn fast, but I always struggled with that in school. Deep diving for sure made my homework go slow, but I understood stuff way better. :)

Coffee in one hand, donut in the other and time to watch Noel's video. ps. wow. that was an interesting "eye opening" video. I didn't know about this charge build up effect on base.

Wow, I learned quite a bit here. Transistors are still something I get the basics of but not beyond, so this was really insightful.

I wish all electronics lectures were this good and this polished! Excellent work Noel ... thank you! 👏👍

Such a great hands-on guide to this issue I have been struggling with. Much of this is relevant with fet-based audio compressors from days gone by. Because the characteristics of the fet are what determine the some of the 'attitude' of the compressor, it is important to know how to find a modern match with similar properties. This now seems less daunting, thank Noel!

It’s this kind of content that sets your channel apart Noel, love it. Thanks for putting the time into this video.

Awesome video! Thank you for taking the time and fully deep dive into subjects like this!

The Miller effect is a multiplication of collector-base CAPACITANCE by the amplifier gain... totally different than base charge of a saturated transistor. A Schottkey diode from base to collector will prevent saturation. This trick is employed in 74Sxx and 74LSxx logic chips.

Awesome video. Very interesting but also easy to follow those of us without a background in electronics. I'd love to see some similar content looking at different types of capacitors.

Great video! Thanks for taking the time to follow this one right through and then share it with us. Very enlightening!

This video is filling the gap left by the previous one! It's very nice of you to delve that deep in this subject!

This was a really great and interesting piece of information, Noel! Well done!

Big love for the deep dives here, never leave a problem unanswered, it's just too interesting having you track down the solution. Oh and your head planting the Art of Electronics book was a great shot!

16:22 The small spike at the output right before the signal falls is also caused by the Miller effect: The input rises at that moment, and the rise goes directly through the parasistic capacitor to the output. The Miller effect amplifies the spike. After a very short delay, the MOSFET starts conducting and the voltage drops to zero.

Very nice research on the transistors. Thank you for the effort showing the process! As for the 2nd edition of AoE, I recently said "What I learned from technical books: Contrary to popular belief they in many cases do not get better with revisions. It's often worth keeping earlier ones around." I'm glad I'm not the only one who found that. It's definitely worth it to keep older revisions.

Older books may have relevant information to restoring older electronics? Yeah that checks out to me and ironically maybe the best advice to people getting into this hobby that I've heard for a while.

Congratulations from Belgium for the simplicity of the explanation which allows everyone to understand without having studied engineering, thank you for sharing.👍😉

This was amazing. Your deep dive was a great story

Never have I been more happy to have an OLDER version of a book. (My "Horowitz & Hill" is the Second Edition.) Thanks!

I've really wondered about this topic myself. Great practical problem to explore this!

Great video as always. Love the deep dive stuff, really informative.

Very informative. Thank you Noel

Brilliant, just the right depth. I always wondered how to determine the correct replacement transistor and this provides a great starting point. More like this please Noel!

Wow. What a comprehensive video. Great information

Fantastic video, Noel! Love these deep dives on electronics. You definitely are a great teacher.

Excellent work! Really great deep dive on implementing the proper transistor for this application.

This was fascinating. Thanks for this.

That was a fantastic video! It had meat on it's bones and you explained it in a very clear manner. Coincidentally I also had to find some modern replacement transistors for a board I've been working on. I loved the experimentation, keep it up!

Excellent video - this is why I love this channel, rather than just telling us the solution, you take us on the journey of learning and experimenting, showing both failures and successes (reminding that a failed experiment is also a succes, because you learned something new). It is really inspiring, thanks for that!

Awesome video!! Using a real-world example as the motivation for this deeper dive into transistors really makes it easy to understand.

The Z80 clock signal spec is more demanding than regular TTL and I suppose they could not integrate the driver on the gate array. The inversion is just a side effect and the gate array could have inverted it for sure, but the primary use of the transistor is to improve the signal. I forgot the details, but it was quite common to use a transistor to match the Z80 clock spec. Note that they used a 74HC04, not a 74HCT04 in the second revision, which is a hint in that direction as well. MOSFETs are a completely different technology than bipolar and while you can get lucky, the considerations to drive them are very different.

Very informative, thanks for sharing your experience 🙂

15:50 Hoorah! I'm happy you opted for fun. Deep dives into things we love are fun. Thanks, Noel.

I loved this video. Thanks, Noel! This one will come in handy for years to come!

Great deep dive Noel... very infomative

Thank you, it was very informative. I again learned something new that I would never use in my life but what can I say, I love the learning part.

I hadn't heard the words "Miller Effect" in over forty years when you uttered them here. Wow... wotta blast from the past, man. Thanks!

Good video. I'm not much of a hardware person, but am picking up a bit these days thanks to you and others working on retro kit. This was a great insight to transistors, which I was always a bit scared of in my distant youth. You are very skillful at explaining things, you have the ability to get into detail, but still keep it enjoyable enough to carry on watching - something my old statistics lecturer was sorely lacking! I also like that you want to know why things work, or don't work. Some would have just found a solution and moved on, likely to be something I would do. But your curiosity has given us another great video.

Very instructive...thanks!

The book 'Art of Electronics,' in Polish known as 'Sztuka elektroniki,' is excellent. It contains a lot of content and is easy to understand. I've been using this book throughout my entire high school, or as we say in Poland, 'W Technikum.' :)

Great informative video Noel 👍🏻

Excellent video, Noel. You have a great way of explaining things!

I don't plan to use transistors, even I don't have plans of working with electronics at this level but, oh man, I enjoyed this video A LOT! Your videos are always full of high quality material, presented in a way that everyone can understand. Great work!

Great info, and a great video Noel.

For that particular transistor I have no problem: 1. I used to work for the manufacturer (Ferranti) 2. I have many ZTX312's and many other ZTX series devices from 45-50 years ago! 😱😳 3. I have several Towers' transistor selector books that detail the critical specs of the transistor and also give equivalents from that time (mid '70's!). I often find that modern equivalents quoted are actually NOT and finding an equivalent of the original equivalent works much better. 😎 Nice explanation of a really good approach though. 👍👍👍

Amazing, I really love your attention to detail.

Very informative. Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Fantastic video, Noel! You're surpassing yourself. And I was delighted to see that you also had to battle the Bibl... err... the Sedra as an undergraduate. So did I! :-) Regarding the clock inverter, if the gate array uses the uninverted clock signal internally, it makes sense to invert it before passing it on to the CPU: the 180-degree phase shift helps account for, and even take advantage of, the propagation delay of the other signals shared with the CPU. The Atari line of 8-bit computers makes liberal use of this kind of phase shift to ensure proper synchronization between CPU and other active components, and it effectively doubles the speed of the system, since you get two clock tics per clock cycle, each in a different part of the system. Back in the day this kind of hack mattered. I also would be very careful about biasing any switching transistor without a base resistor. You got lucky (or perhaps you knew it) that the gate array had an internal pull-up. Otherwise the pin wouldn't be able to source the kind of current you get through a diode to ground, and the chip might have been ruined.

This is some really useful information. Thanks!!

A very humbling video! I recently repaired a friend's Commodore 1541 drive where a resistor went bad and had to use an equivalent NPN resistor. I thought I had done my homework right by comparing specs and it was a success, but you now make me realize I probably just got lucky! 😁

Where were you when I was in the Uni?. Oh man, another masterpiece from Noel !!!!

Brilliant video Noel! I'm still finding my way and a lot of this is miles over my head. But I learned a lot today watching this. Thank you!

The fact you stated about Base saturation made sense in switching times

This is very useful. I'm not just saying that. Please keep making more component videos. Really helps. Great Job!

a really good and instructive video thank you

"Practical Electronics for Inventors" ! My favourite book (even more than "Art of.."). Great video as always!

I *just* encountered this delay effect with a transistor circuit a few days ago. I solved it by replacing the transistor with a different part, but now I know I can add a capacitor or read TAoE. Thanks!

This was so interesting it nice to hear that there still people who appreciate the retro computers enough to research find even small things that to make to make the whole system whole again for a new generation 😀

Excellent work and thanks for sharing. I fully agree that older books are always good to have around. Was doing the same or similar experiments about a month ago.

Transistor in the clock circuit is to adjust the high voltage level to what Z80 needs.

Awesome dive into 👍

Very facinateing and educational thanks noel.

Great video Noel. I had a similar issue when building my Sixty Clone with transistor in Q2. I eventually found one with help from one of the component suppliers, but at the time I thought a lot about transistor replacement for these replica boards.

Thanks for the info!

Fantastic video, thanks a lot. I checked the AoE 3rd ed book and found the Miller effect in Sect. 2.4.5

This guy is awesome. I'm trying to repair an audio power amp - voltage regulators failed - no exact replacements available so seeing if alternatives can be used. 👍

Excellent analysis on transistors... learnt a lot on this video! 😁👍

I restore 2" broadcast video tape machines which are over 60 yrs old and work in the analog world. Compared to those beasts, digital is a piece of cake. I have to find transistors that match in many parameters, some even have to be matched as well because they are used in a balanced circuit. And in the analog circuits they must have a freq response from 30hz to 6mhz. When I was maintaining a complex digital device i thought as long as timing was correct and waveform was clean. I was good to go. Easy Peezy

You have taught me a lot about transistors that I didn't know before

Me devolviste a la facultad con este video. Espectacular la investigación. Excelente video! Gracias.

Very interesting episode!

I love this. Thank you so much

really really Nice, thank you for the great video!!

This topic is really not popular but very useful, I have some retro cards laying around, and some components are not in production anymore, thanks to Noel which dig deep in the topic.

it was very interesting. Thanks 👍

great video nice story behind it to solve the problem

Thank you for covering this topic. BC547 is just cheaply made transistor intended for low frequency amplifiers and similar applications. There are also specialized high frequency transistors available. A metal can package was actually pretty popular in the past. For example, KC507 transistor, a BC547 clone, was produced in metal can as well.

What an awesome timing, just as I need to find some replacement transistors :)

Great transistor experiments!!!!

Fun interesting stuff. I subscribed ☺️. I haven't practiced electronics in over 20 years. I'm just now getting back into it. Been building my Electronics Laboratory Bench. Going back to school this year. It's not about making money it's about having fun 😊!

As you can see at the Oscilloscope the original Transistor does two things here: 1. stabilizing the square (so it is not overshooting etc). 2. amplifying it - as the gatearray does not output 5V (for whatever reason as well). So the transistor is just the cheapest version to implement it in a save way (to ensure that you always end up with a 5V square wave.

Thanks, it was very educational video.

Thanks a lot for this gem of a video.

I didn't watch the video yet, but I know it's going to be good and help me in my repairs. +1 Thumbs up !

New thing for me is the Miller Effect, thanks.

I'm more into microcontrollers etc than retro stuff (although I do have a great nostalgia for the 8-bit days)... so this video was really really useful... more useful than some of the electronics channels... thanks!

Great video. Thanks

Very good! Thank you.

Very interesting, as I ran into this a couple of months ago. My NAD 5000 CD speler stopped working, and despite everyone telling me it was the transport (or laser), I didn't think so. It just didn't make sense. So I started reading, and found that after 25 years 2 transistors tend to burn out because they're not sufficiently cooled. So, I opened up the CD player and the burned spot told me that they were right. But then the search started.. Fortunately, in the end the local (well, 40 minute drive away) electronics store knew the player and what modern replacements WOULD work. And indeed, they did and it works like a charm again. But still, I was lucky there. This makes looking for replacements a bit easier... Thanks!

Awesome video!

Good detective work.

Its a very true thing that many older textbooks often have more indepth information. sometimes as books have to add new info there sometimes is a removal of less sited stuff to keep the cost of the book in a certain price range or it might just be seen as no longer seen as useful. ether way, collect a few older books and store them, you never know

2:20 I didn't know this book. Thank you.

How interesting, depending on the model, the transistors can affect the signal that they can obtain at their output. great video Thanks

Old now as I work through your videos. Most switching transistors have a Ton delay, Toff delay and storage time. High frequency transistors show the collector capacitance as well. The old CRT display base drive circuits for the line output stage were quite novel in trying to minimise storage time by reverse avalanching the base emitter junction to remove the storage charge as fast as they could. you would see a negative spike on the base of 15V.

Great video and I loved the details and your findings. Art of Electronics Edition 2 ,,, don't toss it out! And data sheets with Different pin outs!!! an Obstacle course. Congrats!

Those round bodied transistors are pretty common here in slovakia/czechia the local electronics manufacturer(Tesla) used that design a lot, even for OP, amps and some simple IC's

This video was the best!