I'm looking for links to places where I can search through electrical components for the lowest cut-on voltage in a transistor.
Has there been any website created devoted to this type of searching - I'm trying to locate, in essence, a database of multiple manufacturers' information.
These might be of interest
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2009/01/14/ald-mosfet-device-low-voltage-power-source/
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6404268.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=292169
Darlington FET comes to mind too...
Thank you, I'm looking for a transistor, NPN and PNP which have as low a voltage as possible for their cut-off, essentially, ..the point which the gate stops functioning and the transistor turns off.
I've been looking at Digikey; hopefully they'll send me a catalog. the NTE catalog is huge, maybe I should go grab one of those, ...they actually have listings of these types of things.
The germanium style transistors are rather pricey. ...the NTE100 and NTE101 are exactly the type of performance I'm looking for in a small signal low power transistor, but the per-piece price is around 11 dollars, US.
Jadaro:
As we have seen on the JT topic, the germanium transistors will work down to like .25 to .3 volts, maybe lower depending upon your circuit.
I have a few of these, hard to find but not all that expensive...IF you can find them.
Bill
@jadaro
The correct term to search for is ' low saturation transistor '
Zetex has been known as among the best, now they captured by Diodes Inc. here is their link and enter the above key words:
http://www.diodes.com/search/index.php
You can find several other manufacturers with low saturation types:
http://www.sanyocomponentsdirect.com/Bipolar-Transistors/Bipolar-Transistors/Low-Saturation
http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/parametrics.do?id=808
All these are bipolar Si transistors, with high Beta (hFE) (NOT Darlington), their base-emitter forward voltage is .7 - .8V.
Some of them seems to have better saturation voltage than a Germanium type, see here for instance, at Ic=100mA the sat voltage VCEsat=30mV, this is the voltage drop between the collector-emitter:
http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/NSS1C201L.PDF
You may find them also by searching within bigger sellers pages like Future Electronics, Farnell, Digikey etc.
rgds, Gyula
Ah, thank you gyulasun, having the correct terminology search helps.
Hopefully I'll acquire some of these transistors and do some testing, but I think I can do without them for now. These will be for third of fourth stage of development, or there abouts.
I purchased so many components about a half a year, I may have one or two and not know it. I'm pretty sure I would have skipped buying a 10 or 12 dollar component.