Electronic Circuits Basics
This article's main target is to teach the electronics language to readers that are not familiar with electronics by using a group of rules and simple equations that describe the behavior of every electronic component and the relationship between the components in the circuit. More ...
Digital Logic Transfer Characteristics
In the real world, gates don't transfer logic levels instantaneously. The time it takes for electrons and holes to move through the semiconductor material (called propagation delay) in CMOS are less than 100 ps (pico seconds), but there are other delays caused by resistance, capacitance, and inductance. More ...
Microcontroller Registers
Registers are special small memory locations where the microcontroller can write data to or read data from. Special function registers help point to main memory locations, indicate the result of a mathematical operation, hold parts of an instruction or indicate the status of some operation or hardware feature. Some registers are general purpose and may be used by the programmer at their own discretion. More ...
Operating System Memory Paging
Paging is a memory management scheme that permits a process's physical address space to be noncontiguous. More ...
Change Raspberry Pi Default Configuration
If you are a US user of the Raspberry Pi, you will discover that when you type, the characters displayed do not match our keyboard. When you type [shift][#] instead you get the British pound symbol. This is because Raspbian (and NOOBS) defaults to UK keyboard settings. More ...
The AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first dual-core CPU manufactured by AMD.
It is essentially two Athlon 64 cores on one die joined together with additional control logic. The cores share one dual-channel memory controller. The benefit of dual-core processors is their ability to process more software threads at the same time. However, many programs are written with only one thread. More ...
Microprocessor Counter, Clock, Timer Circuits
All the circuitry in the microprocessor, in fact all the circuitry on the motherboard require a clock signal for operation. The clock signal is the heartbeat of the system. Without a clock signal, the microprocessor and the computer are dead. More ...
AMD's Phenom Processor
AMD released the first Phenom processor in 2007. Unlike Intel's Core 2 Quad processors, which are a multi-chip module (MCM) design, AMD's Phenom processors had all cores on the same silicon die. 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 ...
CPU Chip Packaging
Over the development time of the computer, several different designs of packaging for the CPU chip die have been used. Each type of packaging has its advantages and disadvantages. This article reviews some common packages that might still be in use. More ...
Binary Number Representation and Binary Math
Computers perform all of their amazing work with only two voltage levels, one representing binary 0, the other representing binary 1. This article describes how to perform binary addition and subtraction. More ...
Basic Computer Architecture
Computers today, even that PC on your desk are unbelievably complex. You can't understand computers without an understanding of the basics. In this article I explain basic computer architecture in simple, basic terms. More ...
