Publisher's Synopsis
Electronics means study of flow of electrons in electrical circuits. The word Electronics comes from electron mechanics which means learning the way how an electron behaves under different conditions of externally applied fields. The Institution of Radio Engineers has given a definition of electronics as "that field of science and engineering, which deals with electron devices and their utilization." Fundamentals of electronics are the core subject in all branches of engineering nowadays. Electronic components are used in the automotive, communication, aerospace and other industries. Miniaturization, higher package density and accelerated development processes have a great impact on the reliability of electronic components. Rapid changes of ambient temperature or internal production of heat may occur during operation. This may create high thermal stresses due to the mismatch of the thermal expansion coefficients of the different materials in electronic components. An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. An IC can be made much smaller than a discrete circuit made from independent electronic components - a modern chip may have several billion transistors in an area the size of a human fingernail. Over the past half century, the size, speed, and capacity of chips has increased enormously, driven by technical advances that allow more and more transistors on chips of the same size. These advances, roughly following Moore's law, allow a computer chip of 2016 to have millions of times the capacity and thousands of times the speed of the computer chips of the early 1970s. Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other digital home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs. A relay is an electrically operated switch. Many relays use an electromagnet to mechanically operate a switch, but other operating principles are also used, such as solid-state relays. Relays are used where it is necessary to control a circuit by a separate low-power signal, or where several circuits must be controlled by one signal. The first relays were used in long distance telegraph circuits as amplifiers: they repeated the signal coming in from one circuit and re-transmitted it on another circuit. Relays were used extensively in telephone exchanges and early computers to perform logical operations.
