What is Electronics?
Electronics, pronounced as elec.tron.ics
1: a branch of physics that deals with the emission, behavior, and effects of electrons (as in electron tubes and transistors) and with electronic devices.
2: electronic devices or equipment. Electronics is the science and technology of electronic phenomena. It is a technology of electronic devices
Birth of Electronics The beginnings of electronics can be traced to experiments with electricity. In the 1880s Thomas Alva Edison and others observed the flow of current between elements in an evacuated glass tube. A two-electrode vacuum tube constructed by John A. Fleming (1849-1945) produced a useful output current. The Audio, invented by Lee De Forest (1907), was followed by further improvements. The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs (1947) initiated a progressive miniaturization of electronic components that by the mid 1980s resulted in high-density microprocessors, which in turn led to tremendous advances in computer technology and computer-based automated systems.
Overview of Electronic Circuits An electronic circuit is any indivisible electronic building block packaged in a discrete form with two or more connecting leads or metallic pads. Components are intended to be connected together, usually by soldering to a printed circuit board, to create an electronic circuit with a particular function (for example an amplifier, radio receiver, or oscillator).
Analog circuits The word “analog” implies an analogy between the input and output variables , and the signal voltages and currents in the circuit. An analog circuit is therefore an electric circuit that operates on analog signals.Analog circuits use a continuous range of voltage as opposed to discrete levels as in digital circuits. Analogue circuits are sometimes called linear circuits although many non linear effects are used in analog circuits such as mixers, modulators etc.
Analog circuit (or analogue circuit) refers to electronics systems with analog signals with any continuously variable signal. It differs from digital electronics in that small fluctuations in the signal are meaningful in that they are continuously variable rather than digitally quantised.
Digital circuits
Digital signals typically assume only two discrete values (states) and are appropriate for any phenomena involving counting or integer numbers. While we were mostly interested in voltages and currents at specific points in analog circuits, we will be interested in the information flow in digital circuits. The active elements in digital circuits are either bipolar transistors or FETs. These transistors are permitted to operate in only two states, which normally correspond to two output voltages. Hence the transistors act as switches. Digital circuits are electric circuits based on a number of discrete voltage levels. Digital circuits are the most common mechanical representation of Boolean algebra and are the basis of all digital computers.
Mixed-signal circuits Mixed circuits contain both analog and digital components. Mixed-signal circuits refers to integrated circuits (ICs) which have both analog circuits and digital circuits combined on a single semiconductor die or on the same circuit board.These chips perform some whole function or sub-function in a larger assembly such as the radio subsystem of a cell phone, or the read data path and laser sled control logic of a DVD player. They often contain an entire system-on-a-chip.Because of their use of both digital logic and analog circuitry, mixed-signal ICs are usually designed for a very specific purpose and their design requires a high level of expertise and careful use of the ECAD design automation tools.
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