1.
Electronics
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Electronics is the science of controlling electrical energy electrically, in which the electrons have a fundamental role. Commonly, electronic devices contain circuitry consisting primarily or exclusively of active semiconductors supplemented with passive elements, the science of electronics is also considered to be a branch of physics and electrical engineering. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible, until 1950 this field was called radio technology because its principal application was the design and theory of radio transmitters, receivers, and vacuum tubes. Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control and this article focuses on engineering aspects of electronics. Components are generally intended to be connected together, usually by being soldered to a circuit board. Components may be packaged singly, or in more complex groups as integrated circuits, some common electronic components are capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes, transistors, etc. Components are often categorized as active or passive, vacuum tubes were among the earliest electronic components. They were almost solely responsible for the revolution of the first half of the Twentieth Century. They took electronics from parlor tricks and gave us radio, television, phonographs, radar, long distance telephony and they played a leading role in the field of microwave and high power transmission as well as television receivers until the middle of the 1980s. Since that time, solid state devices have all but completely taken over, vacuum tubes are still used in some specialist applications such as high power RF amplifiers, cathode ray tubes, specialist audio equipment, guitar amplifiers and some microwave devices. The 608 contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors, thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use transistors in their design. From that time on transistors were almost exclusively used for computer logic, circuits and components can be divided into two groups, analog and digital. A particular device may consist of circuitry that has one or the other or a mix of the two types, most analog electronic appliances, such as radio receivers, are constructed from combinations of a few types of basic circuits. Analog circuits use a range of voltage or current as opposed to discrete levels as in digital circuits. The number of different analog circuits so far devised is huge, especially because a circuit can be defined as anything from a single component, analog circuits are sometimes called linear circuits although many non-linear effects are used in analog circuits such as mixers, modulators, etc. Good examples of analog circuits include vacuum tube and transistor amplifiers, one rarely finds modern circuits that are entirely analog. These days analog circuitry may use digital or even microprocessor techniques to improve performance and this type of circuit is usually called mixed signal rather than analog or digital. Sometimes it may be difficult to differentiate between analog and digital circuits as they have elements of both linear and non-linear operation, an example is the comparator which takes in a continuous range of voltage but only outputs one of two levels as in a digital circuit
2.
Reconfigurable computing
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The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to make substantial changes to the datapath itself in addition to the control flow. The concept of reconfigurable computing has existed since the 1960s, when Gerald Estrins paper proposed the concept of a made of a standard processor. The main processor would control the behavior of the reconfigurable hardware, the latter would then be tailored to perform a specific task, such as image processing or pattern matching, as quickly as a dedicated piece of hardware. Once the task was done, the hardware could be adjusted to do some other task and this resulted in a hybrid computer structure combining the flexibility of software with the speed of hardware. Such designs were due to the constant progress of silicon technology that let complex designs be implemented on one chip. The worlds first commercial reconfigurable computer, the Algotronix CHS2X4, was completed in 1991 and it was not a commercial success, but was promising enough that Xilinx bought the technology and hired the Algotronix staff. This paradox is explained by the Von Neumann syndrome. High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing is a computer architecture combining reconfigurable computing-based accelerators like field-programmable gate array with CPUs or multi-core processors, the increase of logic in an FPGA has enabled larger and more complex algorithms to be programmed into the FPGA. The attachment of such an FPGA to a modern CPU over a high speed bus and this has brought reconfigurable computing into the high-performance computing sphere. This heterogeneous systems technique is used in computing research and especially in supercomputing, a 2008 paper reported speed-up factors of more than 4 orders of magnitude and energy saving factors by up to almost 4 orders of magnitude. Some supercomputer firms offer heterogeneous processing blocks including FPGAs as accelerators, one research area is the twin-paradigm programming tool flow productivity obtained for such heterogeneous systems. The US National Science Foundation has a center for high-performance reconfigurable computing, in April 2011 the fourth Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference was held in Europe. Commercial high-performance reconfigurable computing systems are beginning to emerge with the announcement of IBM integrating FPGAs with its POWER processor, Partial re-configuration is the process of changing a portion of reconfigurable hardware circuitry while the other part is still running/operating. Field programmable gate arrays are used as a support to partial reconfiguration. Electronic hardware, like software, can be designed modularly, by creating subcomponents, in many cases it is useful to be able to swap out one or several of these subcomponents while the FPGA is still operating. Normally, reconfiguring an FPGA requires it to be held in reset while an external controller reloads a design onto it. Partial reconfiguration allows for critical parts of the design to continue operating while a controller either on the FPGA or off of it loads a partial design into a reconfigurable module. Partial reconfiguration also can be used to space for multiple designs by only storing the partial designs that change between designs
3.
Digital electronics
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Digital electronics or digital circuits are electronics that handle digital signals rather than by continuous ranges as used in analog electronics. All levels within a band of values represent the information state. In most cases, the number of states is two, and they are represented by two voltage bands, one near a reference value, and the other a value near the supply voltage. These correspond to the false and true values of the Boolean domain respectively, Digital techniques are useful because it is easier to get an electronic device to switch into one of a number of known states than to accurately reproduce a continuous range of values. Digital electronic circuits are made from large assemblies of logic gates. The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he established that by using the binary system. Digital logic as we know it was the brain-child of George Boole, Boole died young, but his ideas lived on. In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations. Lee De Forests modification, in 1907, of the Fleming valve can be used as an AND logic gate, ludwig Wittgenstein introduced a version of the 16-row truth table as proposition 5.101 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Walther Bothe, inventor of the circuit, got part of the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics. Mechanical analog computers started appearing in the first century and were used in the medieval era for astronomical calculations. In World War II, mechanical computers were used for specialized military applications such as calculating torpedo aiming. During this time the first electronic computers were developed. Originally they were the size of a room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers. The Z3 was a computer designed by Konrad Zuse, finished in 1941. It was the worlds first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer and its operation was facilitated by the invention of the vacuum tube in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, the bipolar junction transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the generation of computers
4.
Logic gate
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Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device. In modern practice, most gates are made from field-effect transistors, compound logic gates AND-OR-Invert and OR-AND-Invert are often employed in circuit design because their construction using MOSFETs is simpler and more efficient than the sum of the individual gates. In reversible logic, Toffoli gates are used, to build a functionally complete logic system, relays, valves, or transistors can be used. The simplest family of logic gates using bipolar transistors is called resistor-transistor logic, unlike simple diode logic gates, RTL gates can be cascaded indefinitely to produce more complex logic functions. RTL gates were used in integrated circuits. For higher speed and better density, the used in RTL were replaced by diodes resulting in diode-transistor logic. As integrated circuits became more complex, bipolar transistors were replaced with smaller field-effect transistors, to reduce power consumption still further, most contemporary chip implementations of digital systems now use CMOS logic. CMOS uses complementary MOSFET devices to achieve a high speed with low power dissipation, increasingly, these fixed-function logic gates are being replaced by programmable logic devices, which allow designers to pack a large number of mixed logic gates into a single integrated circuit. Other types of logic gates include, but are not limited to Electronic logic gates differ significantly from their relay-and-switch equivalents and they are much faster, consume much less power, and are much smaller. Also, there is a structural difference. The switch circuit creates a continuous path for current to flow between its input and its output. The semiconductor logic gate, on the hand, acts as a high-gain voltage amplifier. It is not possible for current to flow between the output and the input of a logic gate. Another important advantage of standardized integrated circuit logic families, such as the 7400 and 4000 families, is that they can be cascaded and this means that the output of one gate can be wired to the inputs of one or several other gates, and so on. The output of one gate can drive a finite number of inputs to other gates. Also, there is always a delay, called the propagation delay, when gates are cascaded, the total propagation delay is approximately the sum of the individual delays, an effect which can become a problem in high-speed circuits. The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he established that by using the binary system. In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations
5.
Motorola
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Motorola was an American multinational telecommunications company founded on September 25,1928, based in Schaumburg, Illinois. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola Solutions is generally considered to be the direct successor to Motorola, as the reorganization was structured with Motorola Mobility being spun off. Motorola Mobility was acquired by Lenovo in 2014, Motorola designed and sold wireless network equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. Its business and government customers consisted mainly of wireless voice and broadband systems and these businesses are now part of Motorola Solutions. Google sold Motorola Home to the Arris Group in December 2012 for US$2.35 billion, Motorolas wireless telephone handset division was a pioneer in cellular telephones. Also known as the Personal Communication Sector prior to 2004, it pioneered the mobile phone with DynaTAC and it had staged a resurgence by the mid-2000s with the RAZR, but lost market share in the second half of that decade. Later it focused on smartphones using Googles open-source Android mobile operating system, the first phone to use the newest version of Googles open source OS, Android 2.0, was released on November 2,2009 as the Motorola Droid. The handset division was spun off into the independent Motorola Mobility. On May 22,2012, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google had closed on its deal to acquire Motorola Mobility. On January 29,2014, Page announced that pending closure of the deal, on October 30,2014, Lenovo finalized its purchase of Motorola Mobility from Google. Galvin Manufacturing Corporation set up shop in a section of a rented building. The company had $565 in working capital and five employees, the first weeks payroll was $63. The companys first products were battery-eliminators, devices that enabled battery-powered radios to operate on household electricity, due to advances in radio technology, battery-eliminators soon became obsolete. Paul Galvin learned that some radio technicians were installing sets in cars and his team was successful, and Galvin was able to demonstrate a working model of the radio at the June 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He brought home enough orders to keep the company in business. g, the company sold its first Motorola branded radio on June 23,1930, to H. C. Wall of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for $30, the Motorola brand name became so well-known that Galvin Manufacturing Corporation later changed its name to Motorola, Inc. Galvin Manufacturing Corporation began selling Motorola car-radio receivers to police departments, the companys first public safety customers included the Village of River Forest, Village of Bellwood Police Department, City of Evanston Police, Illinois State Highway Police, and Cook County Police. In the same year, the company built its research and development program with Dan Noble, a pioneer in FM radio and semiconductor technologies, the company produced the hand-held AM SCR-536 radio during World War II, which was vital to Allied communication
6.
Texas Instruments
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Texas Instruments Inc. is an American technology company that designs and manufactures semiconductors, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globally. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, United States, TI is one of the top ten semiconductor companies worldwide, Texas Instrumentss focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which accounts for more than 85% of their revenue. TI also produces TI digital light processing technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, to date, TI has more than 43,000 patents worldwide. TI produced the worlds first commercial silicon transistor in 1950, Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TIs Central Research Labs. TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller in 1970, in 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device, which serves as the foundation for the companys award-winning DLP technology and DLP Cinema. In 1990, TI came out with the popular TI-81 calculator which made them a leader in the calculator industry. In 1997, its business was sold to Raytheon, which allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions. Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941, in November,1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing division, which focused on electronic equipment. By 1951, the L&M division, with its contracts, was growing faster than GSIs Geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc, because there already existed a firm named General Instrument, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. From 1956 to 1961, Fred Agnich of Dallas, later a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, was the Texas Instruments president, Geophysical Service, Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Early in 1988 most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company, in 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service, an early provider of seismic exploration services to the petroleum industry. In 1939, the company reorganized as Coronado Corp. an oil company with Geophysical Service Inc, on December 6,1941, McDermott along with three other GSI employees, J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H. B. During World War II, GSI expanded their services to include electronics for the U. S. Army, Signal Corps, in 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company. Texas Instruments also continued to manufacture equipment for use in the seismic industry, after selling GSI, TI finally sold the company to Halliburton in 1988, at which point GSI ceased to exist as a separate entity. Texas Instruments entered the electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment. During the early 1980s, Texas Instruments instituted a quality program which included Juran training, as well as promoting statistical process control, Taguchi methods and Design for Six Sigma
7.
IBM
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International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in 2014, IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the worlds largest employers, with nearly 380,000 employees. Known as IBMers, IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, in the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines. On June 16,1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D. C. and Toronto. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, Watson joined CTR as General Manager then,11 months later, was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Pattersons pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTRs companies and his favorite slogan, THINK, became a mantra for each companys employees. During Watsons first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million, Watson had never liked the clumsy hyphenated title of the CTR and in 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title International Business Machines. By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in 1937, IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort, in 1949, Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952, he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in 1957, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines, in 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. A year later it moved its headquarters from New York City to Armonk. The latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, on April 7,1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360
8.
Programmable logic array
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A programmable logic array is a kind of programmable logic device used to implement combinational logic circuits. The PLA has a set of programmable AND gate planes, which link to a set of programmable OR gate planes, which can then be conditionally complemented to produce an output. It has 2^N AND Gates for N input variables and for M outputs from PLA, there should be M OR Gates and this layout allows for a large number of logic functions to be synthesized in the sum of products canonical forms. PLAs differ from Programmable Array Logic devices in both the AND and OR gate planes are programmable. In 1970, Texas Instruments developed a mask-programmable IC based on the IBM read-only associative memory or ROAM and this device, the TMS2000, was programmed by altering the metal layer during the production of the IC. The TMS2000 had up to 17 inputs and 18 outputs with 8 JK flip flop for memory, TI coined the term Programmable Logic Array for this device. Obtain the minimum SOP form to reduce the number of terms to a minimum. Decide the input connection of the AND matrix for generating the required product term, then decide the input connections of OR matrix to generate the sum terms. Decide the connections of invert matrix and this is particularly valuable when it is part of a processing chip where transistors are scarce. One application of a PLA is to implement the control over a datapath and it defines various states in an instruction set, and produces the next state. Programmable logic arrays should correspond to a diagram for the system. Other commonly used programmable logic devices are PAL, CPLD and FPGA, note that the use of the word programmable does not indicate that all PLAs are field-programmable, in fact many are mask-programmed during manufacture in the same manner as a mask ROM. This is particularly true of PLAs that are embedded in more complex, PLAs that can be programmed after manufacture are called FPGA, or less frequently FPLA. The Commodore 64 home computer released in 1982 used a 906114-01 PLA to handle system signals, Programmable logic device Field-programmable gate array Gate array Programmable array logic Programmable Logic Array
9.
General Electric
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General Electric, often abbreviated as GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in New York and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2011, GE ranked among the Fortune 500 as the 68th-largest firm in the U. S. by gross revenue, as of 2012, the company was listed the fourth-largest in the world among the Forbes Global 2000, further metrics being taken into account. The Nobel Prize has twice been awarded to employees of General Electric, Irving Langmuir in 1932, on January 13,2016, it was announced that GE will be moving its corporate headquarters from Fairfield, Connecticut to the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The first group of workers arrived in the summer of 2016, morgan and the Vanderbilt family for Edisons lighting experiments. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year, both plants continue to operate under the GE banner to this day. The company was incorporated in New York, with the Schenectady plant used as headquarters for years thereafter. Around the same time, General Electrics Canadian counterpart, Canadian General Electric, was formed, in 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. After 120 years, it is the one of the original companies still listed on the Dow index. In 1911, General Electric absorbed the National Electric Lamp Association into its lighting business, GE established its lighting division headquarters at Nela Park in East Cleveland, Ohio. Nela Park is still the headquarters for GEs lighting business, owen D. Young, through GE, founded the Radio Corporation of America in 1919 to further international radio. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales from 1919, in 1927, Ernst Alexanderson of GE made the first demonstration of his television broadcasts at his General Electric Realty Plot home at 1132 Adams Rd, Schenectady, NY. The sound was broadcast on GEs WGY, experimental television station W2XAD evolved into station WRGB which—along with WGY and WGFM —was owned and operated by General Electric until 1983. GEs history of working with turbines in the field gave them the engineering know-how to move into the new field of aircraft turbosuperchargers. Led by Sanford Alexander Moss, GE introduced the first superchargers during World War I, superchargers became indispensable in the years immediately prior to World War II, and GE was the world leader in exhaust-driven supercharging when the war started. This experience, in turn, made GE a natural selection to develop the Whittle W.1 jet engine that was demonstrated in the United States in 1941, GE ranked ninth among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. In 2002, GE acquired the assets of Enron during its bankruptcy proceedings. Some consumers boycotted GE light bulbs, refrigerators and other products in the 1980s and 1990s to protest GEs role in weapons production. With IBM, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC, GE had a line of general purpose and special purpose computers
