Basic Electronics 1 / Fundamentals of Electronics – Video 1

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[00:00:02]Hello everyone. Welcome to Yom's Electronics.

[00:00:06]In this video the first of our basic electronic series, we are going to answer a very important question. Exactly, what is basic electronics? Many students hear words like electronics, microelectronics, analog electronics, digital electronics, circuits, chips, sensors, amplifiers, and processors, but they do not always know how these are connected.

[00:00:32]So, in this video, we shall explain what electronics means, how electronics differs from microelectronics, the difference between analog and micro- digital electronics, and why modern systems need both analog and digital electronics working together. By the end of this lesson, you should have a clear foundation for studying basic electronic components, circuits, communication systems, embedded systems, and modern electronic devices.

[00:01:01]We start off by asking what electronics is. Electronics is a branch of electrical engineering that deals with the control and movement of electrons through device and circuits.

[00:01:13]In simple terms, electronics is about using electrical signals to process information, control, amplify, convert energy, and communicate data.

[00:01:24]For example, when you use a mobile phone, listen to radio, charge a laptop, or switch on an LED lamp, or use sensor-based security systems, electronics is involved. Basic electronic circuits are usually built from components such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, and integrated circuits.

[00:01:46]These components can be connected on a breadboard for testing or a PCB board for permanent use.

[00:01:57]A a example is an LED circuit.

[00:02:01]A battery supplies electrical energy and resistor limits the current. The LED converts electrical energy into light.

[00:02:12]So, electronics is not only about wires and batteries. It is about using components intelligently to make circuits that perform useful functions.

[00:02:26]Let's compare electronics and microelectronics.

[00:02:31]Electronics deal with circuits and devices built from components that we can often see and handle physically. For example, a resistor, capacitor, diode, LED, small motor, sensors, and power supply are common electronics parts.

[00:02:46]These components may be mounted on a breadboard or soldered onto a printed circuit board shown here.

[00:02:56]Microelectronics, on the other hand, is a specialized part of electronics that deals with extremely small electronic components made inside small semiconductor chips.

[00:03:12]In microelectronics, many transistors are fabricated directly on silicon. These transistors are so small that they are measured in micrometers and even nanometers. A microcontroller, memory chip, CPU, or mobile phone processor contains millions and even billions of tiny transistors.

[00:03:34]So, the main difference is scale and integration. Electronics may deal with individual components connected on a breadboard.

[00:03:43]Microcontrollers deals with very tiny component integrated inside a chip.

[00:03:49]For example, when you build an amplifier using a transistor, resistor, and capacitor on a breadboard, that is electronics at the component level.

[00:04:00]But, when millions of transistors are fabricated inside one processor chip, that is microelectronics.

[00:04:08]However, microelectronics is not separate from electronics. It's actually a specialized and miniaturized form of electronics.

[00:04:17]That is why we can say microelectronics is a subset of electronics.

[00:04:29]The next important idea is analog electronics.

[00:04:37]Analog electronics deals with signals that are that vary continuously with time, as shown here.

[00:04:45]A signal is simply a quantity that carries information. It may be a voltage, current, sound wave, pressure, or light intensity.

[00:04:54]In the real world, most natural signals are analog. For example, our voice is analog. Temperature changes continuously. Light intensity changes continuously. A microphone signal is analog. The voltage from many sensors is also analog.

[00:05:10]In analog electronics, the signal can take many possible values in within a range. For example, a voltage may be volts, 1 volt, 1.2 volts, 1.25 volts, 1.3, or any value between. Analog circuits are used for amplification, filtering, modulation, sensing, power control, radio circuits, and audio processing. Common analog circuits include amplifiers, oscillators, filters, voltage regulators, radio receivers, and sensor conditioning circuits.

[00:05:46]For example, when a microphone picks up your voice, the electrical signal produced is usually very small. An amplifier is used to increase the signal level so it can drive a speaker or be processed by another circuit.

[00:06:03]This is analog electronics. It works with real world signals in their continuous forms.

[00:06:11]Now we move to digital electronics.

[00:06:16]Digital electronics deals with signals represented by discrete levels. In most digital systems, the signals has only two main states, zeros and ones. These are called binary states. A digital signal does not vary smoothly like analog signals. Instead, it changes between fixed values such as low and high.

[00:06:41]For example, 0 may represent 0 V and 1 may represent 5 or 3.3 V depending on the system.

[00:06:49]Digital electronics is the foundation of computers, microcontrollers, digital clocks, calculators, mobile phones, embedded systems, and communication systems.

[00:07:01]Logical gates, flip-flops, registers, counters, memory chips, microprocessors, and FPGAs.

[00:07:11]The advantage of digital electronics is that it's very good for computation, storage, programmability, and reliable data processing.

[00:07:22]For example, a computer does not process the photograph as continuous physical image. It converts it into digital information made up of numbers.

[00:07:33]A microcontroller in an Arduino board uses digital logic to read input and process the control output.

[00:07:44]So, digital electronics represent information using discrete values, mainly binary zeros and ones.

[00:07:56]Then, we take a look at analog versus digital electronics.

[00:08:04]As we've already explained, digital electronics deals with uh discrete values, which could be zeros and ones, while analog electronics deals with continuous signals. Then, the discrete and integrated circuits are circuits that are built on PCB boards that we can see physically. An integrated circuit, as explained earlier on, are millions of transistors and other miniature components that are embedded onto an integrated chip.

[00:08:41]There is a common misconception that analog electronics is old and digital is a new way a new way of life, which can be very misleading. In reality, most digital system depend on analog systems to interact with the real world. The sensors, microphones, antennas, amplifiers, and filters that send information directly to the digital system are all based on analog system.

[00:09:06]In the end, we rely on something called ADC, which is called analog-to-digital converters, to convert the analog signals into digital signals before the digital systems can work on them.

[00:09:19]And vice versa, the information sometimes are also given out in analog form, so you might need a digital-to-analog converter to send information out.

[00:09:29]So, for example, if voice is processed and digitalized before processed, the analog-to-digital converter will process the voice and then the voice is also given out after the digital to analog converter processes back to voice before it's sent out.

[00:09:53]In this last session, we are going to take a look at some applications of analog electronics.

[00:10:02]Before we send a microphone or before we speak into a microphone for the audio to be sent into an amplifier, we might need an for audio to be sent into an antenna.

[00:10:14]You might need an amplifier to amplify the voice and also a low pass filter to take out all noise that might be embedded with the signal. All these are built with analog circuits.

[00:10:28]Now, to be able to send our voice band, which is between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, onto an antenna. If you do the calculation with the wavelength for the wavelength, we are going to get a wavelength of approximately 300 km.

[00:10:43]Now, a rule of thumb says that the length of the antenna should be a fourth of the wavelength, which means you are going to need an antenna of 75 km, which is very impractical. So, what we can do is introduce a carrier frequency generated by an oscillator.

[00:11:00]The carrier frequency could have or the carrier signal could have a frequency as high as um 10 GHz or even in megahertz, which we modulate the signal onto that and then we can have a reasonable antenna size that we can use for our transmission.

[00:11:22]Then, we In this particular slide, we are showing how the modulation process is done. When the modulation is done, we can have in the frequency domain two sides.

[00:11:36]Lower sideband and then the higher sideband.

[00:11:40]Then our signal can modulated onto this carrier signal. And at the receiving end, we'll need a demodulation to demodulate the voice back from that, which we also need an analog to Um we might also need amplifiers because the signal after traveling through a very long distance might be attenuated.

[00:12:02]Um we should also need something like a low-pass filter at the receiving end to also help fish out or filter out any high-frequency noise that might have corrupted the signal.

[00:12:16]In the next video, we are going to go into details and start from ground bottom up. Start with the semiconductor levels and build up all the way to application levels. I hope you enjoy this introductory video.

[00:12:28]Bye.