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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
Operating System Memory Protection in a Paged Environment
Memory protection in a paged environment is accomplished by protection bits associated with each frame. For example read-write, read-only or execute-only bit, and valid-invalid bit. Normally, these bits are kept in the page table. 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 2 Processors
Intel's Core 2 processors, released in July of 2006, are based on the Core microarchitecture, a dual core design using a 65nm manufacturing process to put 291 million transistors on a 143 square mm die. Each core has its own 64KB L1 cache. The two cores share an L2 cache that can be either 2MB or 4MB. 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 ...
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 ...
Load Balancing Multiple CPUs in Symmetric Multiprocessing
On Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems it is important to keep the workload balanced among all processors. There are two approaches to accomplish this, push migration and pull migration. More ...
Pentium P5 Processor
The Pentium P5 processor was introduced in 1993 was the first superscalar processor. It featured two integer pipelines and a pipelined floating-point unit. This article describes other innovations introduced in the P5. More ...
CPU Process Scheduling
CPU scheduling is the basis of multiprogrammed operating systems. By switching the CPU among processes, the operating system can make the computer more productive. More ...
