Fundamental Digital Logic Gates
All the advanced features of the most powerful computers, such as mulicore and parallel processing are done with digital logic. In this article I explain the fundamental concept of digital logic in simple and clear language so that anyone can understand it. More ...
The Microcontroller's Asynchronous Serial Interface
An Asynchronous Serial Interface sends data one bit at a time, as apposed to a parallel interface which send one byte or one word at a time, and asynchronous means it sends them when its ready, without reference to a clock signal. More ...
Capacitors in DC Circuits
A capacitor is a component that can be used to store an electrical charge. A capacitor can be used to create a timer. This time delay can be used to smooth a changing current flow in a circuit, or it can be used to absorb spikes and prevent false triggering of other components. More ...
Online Color Coded Resistor Calculator
To determine the resistance value of a color-coded resistor, select the colors matching each band from the drop-down lists. More ...
Factors in Choosing an Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope is an instrument used to display the waveform of electronic signals. It draws a graph of the voltage as a function of time. A digital oscilloscope can also store waveforms and perform mathematical analysis of the waveform. More ...
Inductors in DC Circuits
An inductor is constructed with a coil of wire. When connected to a voltage source, an inductor resists a change in current flow as it stores energy in its magnetic field, and it can return that energy to the circuit if desired. More ...
Operating System Memory Paging - Page Table Structure
One method of memory management is to break physical memory into fixed size blocks and break logical memory into same sized blocks called pages. The physical location of pages is tracked by a page table. More ...
The Motherboard Chipset
Because the chipset dictates the bus speed, type and amount of memory, and the type and number of I/O ports, much of a computer's performance is determined by its chipset. More ...
AMD's Phenom Processor
Since 2005 AMD has used the Athlon name for their processors. This changed in 2007 when they released their new processor called Phenom. So we must ask the question; what is the difference between the Athlon and the Phenom? More ...
Operating System Memory Page Sharing
In a paged environment sharing of memory among processes provides numerous benefits including sharing non-self-modifying reentrant code and interprocess communication. More ...
Basic Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) Circuitry
One of the primary functions performed by a computer is mathematics. This article describes some of the logic circuits used to create the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of a microprocessor. More ...
Direct Memory Access (DMA)
In early computers, all data transfers required the processor to read and write single words from memory until the entire transfer is complete. With DMA, the DMA controller takes control of the system buses to move data between the device and main memory. More ...