Basic Electronics - Elsevier(基本的电子产品爱思唯尔).PDF
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C H A P T E R 1
Basic Electronics
Jack Ganssle
DC Circuits
“DC” means Direct Current, a fancy term for signals that don’t change. Flat lined, like a
corpse’s EEG or the output from a battery. Your PC’s power supply makes DC out of the
building’s AC (alternating current) mains. All digital circuits require DC power supplies.
Figure 1-1: A DC signal has a constant, unvarying amplitude.
Voltage and Current
We measure the quantity of electricity using voltage and amperage, but both arise from more
fundamental physics. Atoms that have a shortage or surplus of electrons are called ions. An
ion has a positive or negative charge. Two ions of opposite polarity (one plus, meaning it’s
missing electrons and the other negative, with one or more extra electrons) attract each other.
This attractive force is called the electromotive force, commonly known as EMF.
Charge is measured in coulombs, where one coulomb is 6.25 × 1018 electrons (for negative
charges) or protons for positive ones.
An ampere is one coulomb flowing past a point for one second. Voltage is the force between
two points for which one ampere of current will do one joule of work, a joule per second
being one watt.
But few electrical engineers remember these definitions and none actually use them.
5
Chapter 1
Figure 1-2: A VOM, even an old-fashioned analog model like this $10
Radio Shack model, measures DC voltage as well or better than a scope.
An old but still apt analogy uses water flow through a pipe: current would be the amount of
water flowing through a pipe per unit time, while voltage is the pressure of the water.
The unit of current is the ampere (amp), though in computers an a
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