A Simple Method for Measuring Current Amplification Factor

At present, most electronic instruments are composed of IC (integrated circuit) and LSI (large-scale integrated circuit), but crystal transistors, diodes, etc. as discrete semiconductor components are still widely used. When a circuit fails, the first thing to do is to check whether the components are good and whether the performance has deteriorated. For transistors, the current amplification factor is often measured. It is very important to conveniently describe its static characteristics for obtaining the current amplification factor. The digital multimeter is equipped with a transistor socket, which can be used to simply obtain the DC amplification factor\

Figure 5.32 is a photo of hFE measurement with 2SC2320 plugged into the transistor socket. When the test conditions of the transistor socket are VCE = 5V, IB-0.01mA, hFE is 280. The reason why it is quite different from hFE = 333 obtained in Figure 5.28 is that the test conditions are different, so the characteristics of the transistor are also different.