Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Five basic electronics components

Electronics can sometimes look like magic. If there was anyone who jumped right into the current time from say, a century ago, that person would definitely be amazed of today's common electronics products.

But no matter how wonderful it can get, electronics is not rocket science. It is still easily understandable by anyone (anyone willing to, that is :D). 

As I was preparing my first lecture in the Electronics class this semester, it came to my consciousness that actually any physical objects, as far as electronics circuit is concerned, can be modeled into five basic components.

These five basic components are:
1. voltage source (including the controlled type)
2. current source
3. resistor
4. capacitor
5. inductor.

By this I do not mean that there's only five electronics components that exists. They're actually dozens of types, or even limitless. But all of those can arguably be represented by an equivalent model consisting a combination of those five basic components.

I found a term used for this idea, called "Lumped Element Model" (Anant Argawal, 2005), which is a type of circuit abstraction, made to simplify calculations, analysis, design, and probably optimization methods. 

I'm just wondering whether my understanding (about there's only five elementary components) is correct. Can anyone comment on this? I would really appreciate that...

1 Comments:

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1:18 pm  

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