Capacitors in AC Circuits
In an AC circuit capacitors exhibit a property similar to resistance called reactance and cause a phase shift between votage and current. The vector sum of resistance and reactance in an AC circuit is called impedance. More ...
Computer Video Display
If you view a computer as an input-processing-output machine, you can use a keyboard or removable storage device as the input, a program as the processing, but what can you use to retrieve the output? One way to acquire the output, be it text or graphics, is with a video display. More ...
Processor Interrupts
An interrupt is a signal to the processor indicating an event has occurred that needs immediate attention. When an interrupt occurs, the processors normal path of execution is interrupted in order to run a routine to service the interrupt requester. More ...
Logical Versus Physical Memory Addresses
Computers use logical and physical addresses to access memory locatiuons. The CPU generates logical addresses. At run-time the Memory Management Unit (MMU) maps logical addresses to physical addresses. More ...
Stored Program Architecture
Almost every computer system ever made is based on the stored program architecture designed in 1945 design by the mathematician John Von Neumann. He described a system where data and instructions would be stored in memory. More ...
Basic Computer Architecture
Basic computer architecture refers to the structure of a computer system and comprises its hardware, firmware, and software. Hardware consists of the physical components in computer architecture. The main hardware components of the computer architecture include the CPU, memory, and bus. More ...
Expanding the Resources of Microcontrollers
In some cases it is possible that the internal resources of a microcontroller are insufficient. The solution to these situations is to add external components by creating an expanded microcontroller structure. More ...
AMD's Microarchitectures
A microarchitecture describes the physical features, functions, and the technology level of the processes used to manufacture the core of a microprocessor. This article describes the microarchitectures used by AMD. More ...
Binary Floating-Point Numbers
Floating-point numbers allow you to use the very large, and very small, numbers commonly found in scientific calculations. A binary floating-point number consists of three parts, the sign bit, the mantissa and the exponent. More ...
The Computer's Chipset
A computers memory and peripheral ports connect through two highly integrated chips called simply the chipset. The chipset consists of a northbridge chip and a southbridge chip. 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 ...
AMD's Phenom II Processor
Phenom II is AMD's family of 45 nm multi-core processors and is the successor to the original Phenom. In the Phenom II, the shared L3 cache increased from 2MB to 6MB. The chip has an integrated, dual-channel memory controller that supports DDR3 RAM, and 4000MHz HyperTransport technology. More ...
