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 ...
Electronic Circuits
There are five types of circuits; open, short, series, parallel, and series-parallel. Using Ohm's law, along with the reciprocal formula to calculate the equivalent resistance of resistors in parallel, you can calculate the voltage or current in any part of a circuit. More ...
Real-Time CPU Scheduling
In a real-time systems, is one whose operation depends on timing. A task must be serviced within a specific time interval. The tasks and their execution times must all be known. More ...
Intel's Sandy Bridge Micro-Architecture
"Sandy Bridge" is Intel's code name for a new cpu core microarchitecture. It introduces a few new or improved features. The memory controller, the PCI Express controller, and video circuitry are all located within the processor die and the new ring architecture uses a Last Level Cache between the CPU and graphics cores. 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 ...
Microprocessor Registers
To a large extent the operation of a microprocessor involves loading, transferring, and manipulating the contents of registers. In this article you learn about the functions, and purposes of the register set of the Intel 8086 microprocessor. More ...
Data Structures - Linked List, Stack, Queue, and Tree
An array is a simple data structure in which each element can be accessed directly. But what about storing an item whose size may vary? And what about removing an item if the relative positions of the remaining items must be preserved? In such situations other data structures may be needed. More ...
Digital Logic Levels and Transfer Characteristics
A digital system uses discrete logic levels, 0 and 1, while the real world is a continuous range such as a voltage from 0 to 5. To make design easier, engineers view the system in the abstract. More ...
Challenges of Programming Multicore Systems
Operating system designers must write scheduling algorithms that use multiple processing cores and application programmers, mustmodify existing programs and design new programs that are multithreaded. More ...
Analog to Digital Convertion with a Microcontroller
Analog-to-digital conversion (or A/D conversion), is an electronic process that converts a continuously variable signal into a digital signal (expressed as a string of 1s and 0s). 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 ...
Operating System Memory Paging Hardware Support
Paging is a memory management scheme that involves breaking physical memory into fixed-sized blocks and breaking logical memory into blocks of the same size called pages. When a process is to be executed, its pages are loaded into any available memory blocks. More ...
