Electric Fields and Static Electricity
Static electricity is a phenomenon caused by a buildup of unbalanced electric charge that is not moving. We are all familiar with the static electric charge caused by dragging our feet across a carpet and then the sudden static discharge caused by grabbing a door knob. More ...
Bipolar Transistors
Transistors are semiconductor devices used to amplify or switch electronic signals. Transistors are one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. There are basically two types of transistors, Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT) and Field Effect Transistors (FET). 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 ...
Electrical Charge
The forces between electrically charged particles are used in technologies such as printers, pollution filters, and spray guns used for painting cars and trucks. Static electricity is the study of phenomena that involve an imbalance of electrical charge. Although creating this imbalance typically requires moving charge around, once the imbalance is created, it often remains static for a long time. More ...
Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Impurity Doping
Impurity doping is the introduction of controlled amounts of impurities into semiconductors to change their electrical properties. Diffusion and ion implantation are the two key methods of impurity doping. More ...
Common Emitter Configuration Transistor Biasing
To design a common emitter amplifier circuit, use a voltage divider with resistors selected to set the base voltage at the center of the transistor's linear region. Then, through a DC blocking capacitor, apply a waveform to the transistor's base. 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 ...
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 ...
How to Read a Capacitor's Values
Due to the limited space available for printing, physically small capacitors are especially difficult to read. Therefore capacitors use a wide variety of codes to describe their characteristics. 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 ...
Inductors in DC Circuits
When voltage first applied current through an inductive circuit is low because a magnetic field starts building in the coil, and this magnetic field creates a back electromotive force (EMF) that oppose the current in the inductor. More ...
Magnetism
Magnetism is the force exerted by magnets when they attract metals or attract and repel each other. 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 ...
Transforming Sources for Circuit Analysis
Kirchhoff's laws and Ohm's laws can get pretty laborious when you're analyzing complex circuits. Through a transformation technique, you modify a complex circuit so that in the transformed circuit, the devices are all connected in series or in parallel. After the transformation, you no longer need to systematically apply Kirchhoff's laws. More ...
