101 Flashcards
What is a transistor?
> Fundamental building block of digital electrons
> Electrically controlled switches
What is Moore’s Law?
> Transistor count will double every year
> Corrected to the transistor count will double every 2 years
What is the most common type of transistor? what does the name stand for?
> MOSFETS
> Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor
What are the 2 types of MOSFETS?
> N-Type
&
P-type
What is the difference between the different types of MOSFET transistors?
> N-type: require a charge to allow current flow
> P-Type: Require a charge to stop current flow
What are the terminals on MOSFET’s?
> Gate
Drain
Source
What is the hardware hierarchy and what is the order?
> This is the order of how fundamental each parts of a computer are
Transistors, Logic gates, Multiplexers/adders/flip-flops, ALU’s/Regesters, Processor/Memory, MCU’s
What is a microcontroller? What does it contain?
> A small computer on a single chip
> Contains a: microporcessor, memory, ram and peripherals
What is an embedded system?
> This is a system that contains a computer and interacts with its environment
What are some examples of embedded systems?
> SatNav
Digital Camera
ATM
Smoke alarms
What is a signal?
> Refers to a voltage level
What is a digital signal?
> This is a signal with 2 discrete values, on (1) and off (0)
What is an analogue signal?
> A Signal with a continuous range of voltage
What is an ADC?
> This is an analogue to digital converter.
> Converts analogue sound to digital sound
What is the sampling rate? How can it be better quality?
> This is number of times per second that a signal is read
> The higher the sampling rate the better the quality
What is PCM?
> Pulse code modulation, it is a method of converting analogue signals to digital ones
What is the method of PCM?
- Points of amplitude are read off the analogue signal at specific time intervals
- The sound is quantised into discrete amplitude levels
- Each level is converted to a binary code
What is bit depth?
> This is the number of quantised discrete amplitude levels that an audio signal can be converted to.
The number of level is based off the number of bits. 2^n bits. So 16 bits has 65536 levels of amplitude
What is the opposite of a ADC?
> A DAC
> Digital audio converted, this does the opposite of an ADC
