Portal:Electronics

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The Electronics Portal

Danger from batteries
Danger from batteries

The field of electronics comprises the study and use of systems that operate by controlling the flow of electrons (or other charge carriers,e.g. electron holes) 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.

Consumer electronics are electronic devices intended for consumer use. 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.

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Heinrich 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.

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Credit: lirumlar
Microchip dragon: art work made from microchips and other electronic parts as seen in South Korea's Expo 2005 pavilion.

News

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August 14, 2014

512K Day arrives, surpassing some routers capacity, breaking the internet. More...

November 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.

December 4, 2007

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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...

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The Canon EOS 20Da is an 8.2-megapixel semi-professional DSLR camera designed specifically for astrophotography. It was initially announced on February 14, 2005 for release only in Japan. On June 1, Canon announced that the 20Da would be made available worldwide. It is a variant of the Canon EOS 20D. It accepts EF and EF-S lenses.

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A circuit breaker is an automatically operated electrical switch designed to protect an electrical circuit from damage caused by overload or short circuit. Unlike a fuse, which operates once and then has to be replaced, a circuit breaker can be reset (either manually or automatically) to resume normal operation. Circuit breakers are made in varying sizes, from small devices that protect an individual household appliance up to large switchgear designed to protect high voltage circuits feeding an entire city.

Magnetic circuit breakers are implemented using a solenoid (electromagnet) whose pulling force increases with the current. The circuit breaker's contacts are held closed by a latch and, as the current in the solenoid increases beyond the rating of the circuit breaker, the solenoid's pull releases the latch which then allows the contacts to open by spring action.

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