The most exciting new development in electronics is the transistor, a tiny, simple device that can do the work of most vacuum tubes. Transistors are generally mounted in plastic or metal for easy ...

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

One of the topics we've covered multiple times at ExtremeTech is the difficulty of continuing to scale semiconductor technology, and the related problem of improving chip performance without ...

This article presents linear regulators and the computation of its efficiency. It also describes the advantages and other properties of a linear regulator, as well as the low drop out (LDO) regulator, ...

The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into ...

Electronic systems often require multiple voltages to power the various internal circuits. Non-isolated regulators are a common and easy way to convert one voltage to another. Regulators typically ...

Stable regulation of output voltage is an operational imperative of linear regulators. While this topic has been discussed in the past (Reference 1 and Reference 2), this article provides a practical, ...