Basic Electronics

I wrote a course that I presented to college level students back in the 90's. It covers a basic understanding of how Integrated Circuits worked. Since then, the technology has improved significantly, but the basics remain the same. I'm going to try to break the course down into digestible segments for those who'd like to read it.

I plan to break it down into the following posts :

• Hole Movement and Current
• Voltage and Resistance
• Capacitors and Inductors
• Diode and Transistors
• Logic Gates
• Flip-Flops and Memory
• To Be Determined

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Voltage and Resistance

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Voltage

• Potential energy is the amount that something wants to be somewhere else.
• In physical terms, it’s the amount that the egg on the counter wants to be on the floor. Massgravityheight
• In electricity, it’s the amount that a hole at the positive end of a battery wants to get to the negative end of the battery.
• This potential energy is called Voltage
• Voltage is usually represented by the letter V

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Resistance

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Resistance

• Atoms are made up of mostly space. There’s a nucleus in the middle and there are electrons floating around.
• If you look at a free electron that’s trying to get to the positive side, there’s a possibility that as it travels through the conductive metal, it might bump into an atom.
• The probability of an electron running into an atom is known as resistance.
• Resistance is usually represented by the letter R

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Ohm's Law

With that in mind, there are a few factors that affect resistance:

• Atomic density of the substance. The more tightly packed the atoms, the better chance of the electron hitting one.
• Length of the path. As the path gets longer, there’s a higher probability of a collision
• Change in temperature. As the temp increases, the atoms move around a lot more, this increases the chance for collision
• Cross sectional area of the path. As the path gets larger, there’s a better chance of avoiding collision
• When the electrons hit atoms, they use up a little bit of energy. So in order for the electron to move from one end to the other, there has to be sufficient potential energy.
• The higher the resistance, the higher the potential energy required to get the electron through.
• If you kept the resistance constant and increased the voltage, the net current carriers would be greater.
• In 1827, this relationship was discovered by Georg Ohm
  
  

  This is Ohm’s Law

  
  V=I*R
  

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References

Voltage
Resistance
Ohm's Law

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Any comments/questions/recommendations?

Let me know if you found this useful/interesting. Do you have any recommendations for formatting?