Category
Electronics
All Nolege News articles on Electronics.
3 articles
Electronics
There is a machine with moving parts inside your phone, and the parts move by about the width of an atom
Your phone knows which way it is held because a block of silicon on silicon springs is being pushed around inside it. It is a mechanical machine, etched rather than assembled, and the hardest part of building one is stopping it sticking to itself.
Read more →
Electronics
Your air quality monitor cannot smell anything. It watches oxygen cling to a grain of tin oxide
The gas sensor in an LPG alarm or a ₹2,000 indoor air monitor is a heated speck of metal oxide whose electrical resistance changes when a gas burns off the oxygen stuck to its surface. Understanding that one sentence explains why the readings drift, why humidity confuses them, and why the 'CO₂' number is usually not a measurement at all.
Read more →
Electronics
How a semiconductor actually works
A semiconductor is neither a good conductor nor a good insulator, and that awkward middle position is exactly what makes modern electronics possible. Here is how doping, junctions and transistors turn silicon into a switch.
Read more →