The transistor will go down as one of the most consequential inventions in history, behind agriculture, paper, and the Super Soaker. But on the list of inventions that have completely transformed the very fabric of the human condition, it showed up pretty late in the game, and that's because it's a fairly complex thing. Conceptually … Continue reading 5 Stages of understanding transistors
Tag: electronics
Find Your Niche
Because I spend all day at work browsing DigiKey and reading articles about electronics, I get served up ads for textbooks, causing me to rapidly and aggressively re-evaluate my life. One of the books it advertised was titled "Wandering Spurs in MASH-Based Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizers" by Dawei Mai & Michael Peter Kennedy. This is the … Continue reading Find Your Niche
WTF is parasitic capacitance?
I've always enjoyed the term "hand-wavey". It's such a stark contrast to what people imagine engineers do. You learn all this advanced calculus and linear algebra in college, and get a giant transfer function for your circuit and do the Laplace transform and draw a graph and there's all this talk of poles and phase … Continue reading WTF is parasitic capacitance?
“So like…what even IS a resistor?”
A friend of mine who had taken a circuits class asked me this and at first I was confused. He took a whole circuits class, half of it was spent on resistors. And then I realized it's honestly a really good question. They're presented as a scribble on a chalkboard with no context, you do … Continue reading “So like…what even IS a resistor?”
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