Portal:Electronics
The Electronics Portal
The field of electronics comprises the study and use of systems that operate by controlling the flow of electrons (or other charge carriers) in devices such as thermionic valves and semiconductors. The design and construction of electronic circuits to solve practical problems is an integral technique in the field of electronics engineering and is equally important in hardware design for computer engineering. All applications of electronics involve the transmission of either information or power. Most deal only with information.
Consumer electronics are electronic devices intended for everyday use by people. Consumer electronics usually find applications in entertainment, communications and office productivity. Consumer electronics are manufactured throughout the world, although there is a particularly high concentration of manufacturing activity in the Far East. One overriding characteristic of all consumer electronic products is the trend of ever-falling prices. This is driven by gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation, coupled with improvements in semiconductor design. Selected biographyHeinrich Rudolf Hertz (February 22, 1857 - January 1, 1894) was the German physicist and mechanician for whom the hertz, an SI unit, is named. In 1888, he was the first to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic radiation by building an apparatus to produce UHF radio waves. Hertz helped establish the photoelectric effect when he noticed that a charged object loses its charge more readily when illuminated by ultraviolet light. The Hertzian cone was first described by Hertz as a type of wave-front propagation through various media. His experiments help expand the field of electromagnetism transmission and his apparatus was developed further by others in the history of radio. Selected designCredit: commons:User:Achim Köhler Cascode circuit with NPN bipolar transistors. Selected pictureCredit: User:John Fader Both sides of the printed circuit board inside a typical keydrive (circa 2004), in this case an inexpensive 64 Mbyte USB2.0 device. NewsNovember 19, 2008 The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said that repairing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will cost up to €16.6 million or US$21 million. More... April 30, 2008 HP Labs announces the creation of a Memristor, the fourth basic element of electronic circuits with the Resistor, Capacitor, and Inductor. More... December 4, 2007 On the third day of the 2007 Taipei IT Month in Taiwan yesterday, notebook computers and desktop computers built with AMD's Phenom processor and Intel Penryn processor openly battled for the consumer-market after each company launched their quad core processors. More... February 27, 2007 The new South Pole Telescope has recently collected its first light in a long-term project to learn about the nature of dark energy. More... Main topicsElectronics - Consumer electronics - Engineering - Manufacturing - Symbols - Terms - Units - Waste Theory: Ampère's law - Coulomb's law - Frequency - Hall effect - Joule's laws - Kirchhoff's laws - Millman's Theorem - Moore's Law - Norton's theorem - Ohm's law - Peukert's law - Resistance - Thévenin's theorem- Superposition - Wavelength Components: Antenna - Capacitor - Connectors - Diode - Fuse - Ground - Inductor - Integrated circuit - LCD - Magnetron - Phased array - Printed circuit board - Resistor - Thermocouple - Transformer - Transistor - Switch - Wire Circuits: AC - Bridge - Designs - Diagrams - DC - Impedance - Load - Series and parallel - Voltage divider - Voltage drop Fields: Avionics - Computer systems - Control systems - Electromechanics - Microelectronics - Military - Optoelectronics - Power - Quantum electronics - Radio - Robotics - Semiconductors - Spintronics - Telecommunications Products: Cameras - Computers - Fiber optics - Lasers - Lights - Mobile phones - Printed circuit board - Radios - TVs Related portalsConsumer showcaseSirius Satellite Radio is one of two satellite radio (SDARS) services operating in the United States and Canada. (XM Radio is the other provider.) Headquartered in New York City, Sirius provides 69 streams (channels) of music and 65 streams of sports, news and entertainment to listeners. Music streams on Sirius carry a wide variety of music genres, broadcasting 24 hours a day, commercial-free. With most Sirius-enabled radios, the user can see the artist and song information on display while listening to the stream. Selected articleSemiconductor devices are electronic components that exploit the electronic properties of semiconductor materials, principally silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide. Semiconductor devices have replaced thermionic devices (vacuum tubes) in most applications. They use electronic conduction in the solid state as opposed to the gaseous state or thermionic emission in a high vacuum. The main reason semiconductor materials are so useful is that the behaviour of a semiconductor can be easily manipulated by the addition of impurities, known as doping. Semiconductor conductivity can be controlled by introduction of an electric field, by exposure to light, and even pressure and heat; thus, semiconductors can make excellent sensors. Semiconductor devices are manufactured both as single discrete devices and as integrated circuits (ICs), which consist of a number—from a few to millions—of devices manufactured and interconnected on a single semiconductor substrate. CategoriesWikiProjects |