Darlington Transistor

In electronics, the Darlington transistor (often called a Darlington pair) is a compound structure consisting of two bipolar transistors (either integrated or separated devices) connected in such a way that the current amplified by the first transistor is amplified further by the second one. This configuration gives a much higher common-emitter current gain than each transistor taken separately and, in the case of integrated devices, can take less space than two individual transistors because they can use a shared collector. Integrated Darlington pairs come packaged singly in transistor-like packages or as an array of devices (usually eight) in an integrated circuit.

The Darlington configuration was invented by Bell Laboratories engineer Sidney Darlington in 1953. He patented the idea of having two or three transistors on a single chip sharing a collector.

A similar configuration but with transistors of opposite type (NPN and PNP) is the Sziklai pair, sometimes called the "complementary Darlington."