101

Question 1

What is a transistor?

Answer 1

> Fundamental building block of digital electrons

> Electrically controlled switches

Question 2

What is Moore’s Law?

Answer 2

> Transistor count will double every year

> Corrected to the transistor count will double every 2 years

Question 3

What is the most common type of transistor? what does the name stand for?

Answer 3

> MOSFETS

> Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor

Question 4

What are the 2 types of MOSFETS?

Answer 4

> N-Type
&
P-type

Question 5

What is the difference between the different types of MOSFET transistors?

Answer 5

> N-type: require a charge to allow current flow

> P-Type: Require a charge to stop current flow

Question 6

What are the terminals on MOSFET’s?

Answer 6

> Gate
Drain
Source

Question 7

What is the hardware hierarchy and what is the order?

Answer 7

> This is the order of how fundamental each parts of a computer are
Transistors, Logic gates, Multiplexers/adders/flip-flops, ALU’s/Regesters, Processor/Memory, MCU’s

Question 8

What is a microcontroller? What does it contain?

Answer 8

> A small computer on a single chip

> Contains a: microporcessor, memory, ram and peripherals

Question 9

What is an embedded system?

Answer 9

> This is a system that contains a computer and interacts with its environment

Question 10

What are some examples of embedded systems?

Answer 10

> SatNav
Digital Camera
ATM
Smoke alarms

Question 11

What is a signal?

Answer 11

> Refers to a voltage level

Question 12

What is a digital signal?

Answer 12

> This is a signal with 2 discrete values, on (1) and off (0)

Question 13

What is an analogue signal?

Answer 13

> A Signal with a continuous range of voltage

Question 14

What is an ADC?

Answer 14

> This is an analogue to digital converter.

> Converts analogue sound to digital sound

Question 15

What is the sampling rate? How can it be better quality?

Answer 15

> This is number of times per second that a signal is read

> The higher the sampling rate the better the quality

Question 16

What is PCM?

Answer 16

> Pulse code modulation, it is a method of converting analogue signals to digital ones

Question 17

What is the method of PCM?

Answer 17

1. Points of amplitude are read off the analogue signal at specific time intervals
2. The sound is quantised into discrete amplitude levels
3. Each level is converted to a binary code

Question 18

What is bit depth?

Answer 18

> This is the number of quantised discrete amplitude levels that an audio signal can be converted to.
The number of level is based off the number of bits. 2^n bits. So 16 bits has 65536 levels of amplitude

Question 19

What is the opposite of a ADC?

Answer 19

> A DAC

> Digital audio converted, this does the opposite of an ADC