Publisher's Synopsis
Electronics is the science of controlling electrical energy electrically, in which the electrons have a fundamental role. Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, integrated circuits, associated passive electrical components, and interconnection technologies. Semiconductors are used extensively in electronic circuits. As its name implies, a semiconductor is a material that conducts current, but only partly. The conductivity of a semiconductor is somewhere between that of an insulator, which has almost no conductivity, and a conductor, which has almost full conductivity. Most semiconductors are crystals made of certain materials, most commonly silicon. IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is a standard electronic interface used between a computer motherboard's data paths or bus and the computer's disk storage devices. The IDE interface is based on the IBM PC Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) 16-bit bus standard, but it is also used in computers that use other bus standards. An active device is any type of component with the ability to electrically control the flow of current (controlling one electric signal with another electric signal). For a circuit to be called electronic, it must contain at least one active device. All active devices control the flow of current through them. One type of active device uses a voltage to control the current while another type of active devices uses another current to be the controlling signal. Devices utilizing a voltage as the controlling signal are, not surprisingly, called voltage-controlled devices. Devices working on the principle of one current controlling another current are known as current-controlled devices. The first type of transistor successfully demonstrated was a current-controlled device. This book presents the basic concepts of electronic devices and circuits in a simple manner. A number of design and analytic numerical problems have been included to help the student understand the application of the concepts clearly.
