The Need for Flexibility in Amplifier Design

Improvements in detector resolution and increases in the sophistication of nuclear experiments have placed an entirely new emphasis on linear amplifier design. Just a few years ago it was necessary to have specialized amplifiers to deal with each specific problem. The lack of flexibility now plaguing most existing linear pulse amplifying systems is often quite annoying to the user. Invariably, the user will find the amplifying system failing in part to provide either adequate stability, polarity reversibility, clipping mode selection, control of rise and fall times, adequate control of gain, or threshold cut and expansion. What usually ensues is that large amounts of time and effort are expended in modifying existing amplifiers in order to accomplish the particular job at hand, or the Job is done with an existing system where poor amplifier performance is accepted as a necessary evil. In the past several years many notable pulse amplifiers have been produced. Among these are the DD-2, the A-8, and the alpha amplifiers designed under the direction of Fairstein, Borkowski, and Blankenship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Although these amplifiers show exceptional performance in their particular specialized application, all of these amplifiers lack the flexibility desired in a modern general-purpose laboratory amplifier. What is needed today is an amplifying system possessing the best basic features of these highly successful amplifiers with the addition of the features mentioned earlier to obtain greater flexibility and therefore greater utility. In early 1961, an amplifying system of this type was introduced at LRL.