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 ...
Microcontrollers
A microcontroller is an IC that contains a microprocessor as well as RAM, ROM and general I/O ports. Engineers design microcontrollers into specific-purpose devices such as microwave ovens, cars, washing machines, refridgerators, and even space probes. More ...
Intel's Core i7 Processors
Core i7 is a family of Intel quad core processors, that is, they have four processors on a single silicon chip. All four processor cores and all memory caches, including a 64K L1 cache, a 256K L2 cache, and a shared L3 cache are located on one chip. The memory is also located on the same chip. More ...
The Use of SOI (Silicone on Insulator) Wafers in MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) Production
The main advantage of Silicone on Insulator (SOI) technology is that they enable the manufacture of smaller devices. The manufacturing process optimizes the efficiency of transistors and allows chips to be packed close together, resulting in a greater yield per wafer. 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 ...
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 ...
Simplified Windows Architecture Overview
A simplified overview of the Windows operating system architecture divides it into user-mode and kernel-mode components. More ...
Arduino Microcontroller Development Platform
The benefit of the open source Arduino Microcontroller Development Platform is that the software is free and the hardware is cheap. This makes it one of the cheapest platforms on which to develop prototypes. 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 ...
The Many Processes of Silicon Wafer Manufacturing
A silicon wafer is a thin, circular disc used in the manufacture of integrated circuits and semiconductors. The silicon wafer manufacturing process is interesting. More ...
Using the Microcontroller Timers
Timing is an essential function for generating signals with precisely determined duration, or for counting external events. For this reason, a timer subsystem is present in all microcontroller implementations. More ...
Operating System Services
An operating system provides an environment for the execution of programs. It provides certain services to programs and to the users of those programs. These operating system services are provided for the convenience of the programmer, to make the programming task easier. More ...
