High voltage nanosecond pulse switching circuit based on avalanche transistor

Abstract

A very high speed switching circuit in kilovolt regime has been applied in laser diode driver, streak camera and laser Q-switching. The avalanche transistor is ideally suits to this mode operation and application. In this paper, a simple circuit to switch the high voltage in a few nanoseconds has been developed. Sixteen ZTX 415 avalanche transistors were used to switch 4.46 kV in 3.04 ns of falling time with 93.96 us of switching pulse duration. The result also shows that the switching pulse duration and falling time of circuit is independent on the operation voltage as well as the number of transistor.