Conductors and Insulators
Materials can be classified depending on whether they allow charge to move. If charge can easily move through a material, these materials are called conductors. If charge cannot move through a material, then this material is called an insulator. More ...
Light Emitting Diode (LED)
An LED is a diode that converts electrical current directly into light and therefore it is more efficient than other sources of light which convert some energy into heat. When electrons recombine with holes in the depletion region they release energy in the form of light photons. More ...
How to Calculate Impedance
Impedance is one of the most difficult things the electronics technician student needs to calculate. To calculate impedance, you must know the value of all resistors and the impedance of all inductors and capacitors in the circuit. Then you can calculate impedance using a simple mathematical formula. More ...
RC Filters
An RC filter can accept input sinewave signals and block certain bands of frquencies, thus allowing to pass only desired frquencies. This section describes passive RC filters. A passive RC filter uses only resistors and capacitors. More ...
Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Etching
photolithography is the process of transferring patterns to photoresist covering the surface of a semiconductor wafer. To produce circuit features, these resist patterns must be transferred into the underlying layers of the device. Pattern transfer is accomplished by an etching process that selectively removes unmasked portions of a layer. More ...
Lead-Acid Battery Chemistry
As a lead-acid battery is repeatedly recharged, sulfation will build-up on the plates and the battery will begin to loose its capacity to restore to a full charge and eventually must be replaced. More ...
Integrated Circuits
An integrated circuit (IC) is a thin rectangular piece of semiconductor upon which, using a photographic process, thousands of electronic components, and the conducting paths to connect them, are printed. The types circuits that can be etched into a semiconductor chip range from amplifiers to logic gates and even microprocessors with millions of transistors. More ...
Batteries
Early in the history of electrical science, laboratory physicists found that when metals came into contact with certain chemical solutions, voltages appeared between the pieces of metal. These were the first electrochemical cells. More ...
What Is an Electronic Circuit?
Circuits provide a path for current to flow. To be a circuit, this path must start and end at the same point. In other words, a circuit must form a loop. More ...
EMI, RFI, EMC, EMS, What's the Difference?
EMI, RFI, EMC, and EMS all refer to different aspects of radio frequency interference which may cause elecronic devices to malfunction. Correcting these problems can be an art and a science. More ...
Planar Integrated Circuit Fabrication
The key unit process steps in IC fabrication, include oxidation, photolithography, etching, ion implantation, and metallization. Here, we describe the oxidation steps. More ...
Introduction to Integrated Circuit Manufacturing
An integrated circuit is an ensemble of active (e.g., transistors) and passive devices (e.g., resistors, capacitors, and inductors) formed on and within a single-crystal semiconductor substrate and interconnected by a metallization pattern. More ...
Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Deposition
Many different types of thin films are used to manufacture integrated circuits, including thermal oxides, dielectric layers, epitaxial layers, polycrystalline silicon, and metal films. This article addresses two techniques for depositing such films. More ...
Use a Resistor to Measure Inductance
Inductance is usually measured by using an LCM multimeter. It can also be mesured using a resistor. With the resistor method, you adjust the frequency of a sine wave until the AC voltage accross the resistor and inductor are equal. Then using a formula to calculate the inductance. More ...
