Electronic Circuits

ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
INTRODUCTION:
An electronic circuit is composed of individual electronic components, such
as resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductorsand diodes, connected by
conductive wires or traces through which electric current can flow. To be referred to
as electronic, rather than electrical, generally at least one active component must be
present. The combination of components and wires allows various simple and complex
operations to be performed: signals can be amplified, computations can be performed,
and data can be moved from one place to another.[1]
Circuits can be constructed of discrete components connected by individual pieces of
wire, but today it is much more common to create interconnections by photolithographic
techniques on a laminated substrate (a printed circuit board or PCB) and solder the
components to these interconnections to create a finished circuit. In an integrated
circuit or IC, the components and interconnections are formed on the same substrate,
typically a semiconductor such as silicon or (less commonly) gallium arsenide.[2]
An electronic circuit can usually be categorized as an analog circuit, a digital circuit, or a
mixed-signal circuit (a combination of analog circuits and digital circuits).
Breadboards, perfboards, and stripboards are common for testing new designs. They
allow the designer to make quick changes to the circuit during development.
ANALOG CIRCUITS:
Analog electronic circuits are those in which current or voltage may vary continuously
with time to correspond to the information being represented. Analog circuitry is
constructed from two fundamental building blocks: seriesand parallel circuits.
In a series circuit, the same current passes through a series of components. A string of
Christmas lights is a good example of a series circuit: if one goes out, they all do.
In a parallel circuit, all the components are connected to the same voltage, and the current
divides between the various components according to their resistance.
The basic components of analog circuits are wires, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes,
and transistors. (In 2012 it was demonstrated that memristors can be added to the list of
available components.) Analog circuits are very commonly represented in schematic
diagrams, in which wires are shown as lines, and each component has a unique symbol.
Analog circuit analysis employs Kirchhoff's circuit laws: all the currents at a node (a
place where wires meet), and the voltage around a closed loop of wires is 0. Wires are
usually treated as ideal zero-voltage interconnections; any resistance or reactance is
captured by explicitly adding a parasitic element, such as a discrete resistor or inductor.
Active components such as transistors are often treated as controlled current or voltage
sources: for example, a field-effect transistorcan be modeled as a current source from the
source to the drain, with the current controlled by the gate-source voltage.
An alternative model is to take independent power sources and induction as basic

electronic units; this allows modeling frequency dependent negative
resistors, gyrators, negative impedance converters, and dependent sources as secondary
electronic components
When the circuit size is comparable to a wavelength of the relevant signal frequency, a
more sophisticated approach must be used, the distributed element model. Wires are
treated as transmission lines, with nominally constant characteristic impedance, and
the impedances at the start and end determine transmitted and reflected waves on the line.
Circuits designed according to this approach are distributed element circuits. Such
considerations typically become important for circuit boards at frequencies above a GHz;
integrated circuits are smaller and can be treated as lumped elements for frequencies less
than 10GHz or so.
DIGITAL CIRCUITS:
In digital electronic circuits, electric signals take on discrete values, to represent logical
and numeric values.[3] These values represent the information that is being processed. In
the vast majority of cases, binary encoding is used: one voltage (typically the more
positive value) represents a binary '1' and another voltage (usually a value near the
ground potential, 0 V) represents a binary '0'. Digital circuits make extensive use
of transistors, interconnected to create logic gates that provide the functions of Boolean
logic: AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR and combinations thereof. Transistors
interconnected so as to provide positive feedback are used as latches and flip flops,
circuits that have two or more metastable states, and remain in one of these states until
changed by an external input. Digital circuits therefore can provide logic and memory,
enabling them to perform arbitrary computational functions. (Memory based on flip-
flops is known as static random-access memory (SRAM). Memory based on the storage
of charge in a capacitor, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) is also widely used.)
The design process for digital circuits is fundamentally different from the process for
analog circuits. Each logic gate regenerates the binary signal, so the designer need not
account for distortion, gain control, offset voltages, and other concerns faced in an analog
design. As a consequence, extremely complex digital circuits, with billions of logic
elements integrated on a single silicon chip, can be fabricated at low cost. Such digital
integrated circuits are ubiquitous in modern electronic devices, such as calculators,
mobile phone handsets, and computers. As digital circuits become more complex, issues
of time delay, logic races, power dissipation, non-ideal switching, on-chip and inter-chip
loading, and leakage currents, become limitations to circuit density, speed and
performance.
Digital circuitry is used to create general purpose computing chips, such
as microprocessors, and custom-designed logic circuits, known as application-specific
integrated circuit (ASICs). Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), chips with logic
circuitry whose configuration can be modified after fabrication, are also widely used in
prototyping and development.
MIXED-SIGNAL CIRCUITS:
Mixed-signal or hybrid circuits contain elements of both analog and digital circuits.
Examples include comparators, timers, phase-locked loops, analog-to-digital converters,
and digital-to-analog converters. Most modern radio and communications circuitry uses
mixed signal circuits. For example, in a receiver, analog circuitry is used to amplify and
frequency-convert signals so that they reach a suitable state to be converted into digital
values, after which further signal processing can be performed in the digital domain.

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ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS

An alternative model is to take independent power sources and induction as basic

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