How Capacitors Work

by Marshall Brain and Charles W. Bryant

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Brain, Marshall, and Charles W. Bryant. "How Capacitors Work." 17 September 2007.
HowStuffWorks.com. <http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm> 10 June
2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Capacitors Work

2. Capacitor Circuit
3. Farad

4. History of the Capacitor

5. Lots More Information
6. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

 More Electronics Videos »

Capacitor Quiz
 Flash capacitor from a point-and-shoot camera. Take the capacitor quiz to learn more.

In a way, a capacitor is a little like a battery. Although they work in completely different
ways, capacitors and batteries both store electrical energy. If you have read How
Batteries Work, then you know that a battery has two terminals. Inside the battery,
chemical reactions produce electrons on one terminal and absorb electrons on the other
terminal. A capacitor is much simpler than a battery, as it can't produce new electrons -- it
only stores them.

In this article, we'll learn exactly what a capacitor is, what it does and how it's used in
electronics. We'll also look at the history of the capacitor and how several people helped
shape its progress.

Inside the capacitor, the terminals connect to two metal plates separated by a non-
conducting substance, or dielectric. You can easily make a capacitor from two pieces of
aluminum foil and a piece of paper. It won't be a particularly good capacitor in terms of
its storage capacity, but it will work.

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In theory, the dielectric can be any non-conductive substance. However, for practical
applications, specific materials are used that best suit the capacitor's function. Mica,
ceramic, cellulose, porcelain, Mylar, Teflon and even air are some of the non-conductive
materials used. The dielectric dictates what kind of capacitor it is and for what it is best
suited. Depending on the size and type of dielectric, some capacitors are better for high
frequency uses, while some are better for high voltage applications. Capacitors can be
manufactured to serve any purpose, from the smallest plastic capacitor in your calculator,
to an ultra capacitor that can power a commuter bus. NASA uses glass capacitors to help
wake up the space shuttle's circuitry and help deploy space probes. Here are some of the
various types of capacitors and how they are used.

 Air - Often used in radio tuning circuits

 Mylar - Most commonly used for timer circuits like clocks, alarms and counters
 Glass - Good for high voltage applications
 Ceramic - Used for high frequency purposes like antennas, X-ray and MRI
machines
 Super capacitor - Powers electric and hybrid cars

In the next section, we'll take a closer look at exactly how capacitors work.

Capacitor Circuit
In an electronic circuit, a capacitor is shown like this:

©2007 HowStuffWorks

When you connect a capacitor to a battery, here's what happens:

  The plate on the capacitor that attaches to the negative terminal of the battery
accepts electrons that the battery is producing.
 The plate on the capacitor that attaches to the positive terminal of the battery loses
electrons to the battery.

Once it's charged, the capacitor has the same voltage as the battery (1.5 volts on the
battery means 1.5 volts on the capacitor). For a small capacitor, the capacity is small. But
large capacitors can hold quite a bit of charge. You can find capacitors as big as soda cans
that hold enough charge to light a flashlight bulb for a minute or more.

Even nature shows the capacitor at work in the form of lightning. One plate is the cloud,
the other plate is the ground and the lightning is the charge releasing between these two
"plates." Obviously, in a capacitor that large, you can hold a huge amount of charge!

Let's say you hook up a capacitor like this:

Farad
Capacitive Touch Screens
One of the more futuristic applications of capacitors is the capacitive touch screen. These are
glass screens that have a very thin, transparent metallic coating. A built-in electrode pattern
charges the screen so when touched, a current is drawn to the finger and creates a voltage drop.
This exact location of the voltage drop is picked up by a controller and transmitted to a computer.
These touch screens are commonly found in interactive building directories and more recently in
Apple's iPhone.

A capacitor's storage potential, or capacitance, is measured in units called farads. A 1-

farad capacitor can store one coulomb (coo-lomb) of charge at 1 volt. A coulomb is
6.25e18 (6.25 * 10^18, or 6.25 billion billion) electrons. One amp represents a rate of
electron flow of 1 coulomb of electrons per second, so a 1-farad capacitor can hold 1
amp-second of electrons at 1 volt.

A 1-farad capacitor would typically be pretty big. It might be as big as a can of tuna or a
1-liter soda bottle, depending on the voltage it can handle. For this reason, capacitors are
typically measured in microfarads (millionths of a farad).

To get some perspective on how big a farad is, think about this:

 A standard alkaline AA battery holds about 2.8 amp-hours.

 That means that a AA battery can produce 2.8 amps for an hour at 1.5 volts (about
4.2 watt-hours -- a AA battery can light a 4-watt bulb for a little more than an
hour).
 Let's call it 1 volt to make the math easier. To store one AA battery's energy in a
capacitor, you would need 3,600 * 2.8 = 10,080 farads to hold it, because an amp-
hour is 3,600 amp-seconds.

If it takes something the size of a can of tuna to hold a farad, then 10,080 farads is going
to take up a LOT more space than a single AA battery! Obviously, it's impractical to use
capacitors to store any significant amount of power unless you do it at a high voltage.

Applications
The difference between a capacitor and a battery is that a capacitor can dump its entire
charge in a tiny fraction of a second, where a battery would take minutes to completely
discharge. That's why the electronic flash on a camera uses a capacitor -- the battery
charges up the flash's capacitor over several seconds, and then the capacitor dumps the
full charge into the flash tube almost instantly. This can make a large, charged capacitor
extremely dangerous -- flash units and TVs have warnings about opening them up for this
reason. They contain big capacitors that can, potentially, kill you with the charge they
contain.
© Photographer: Newstocker | Agency: Dreamstime.com
A family of capacitors

Capacitors are used in several different ways in electronic circuits:

 Sometimes, capacitors are used to store charge for high-speed use. That's what a
flash does. Big lasers use this technique as well to get very bright, instantaneous
flashes.
 Capacitors can also eliminate ripples. If a line carrying DC voltage has ripples or
spikes in it, a big capacitor can even out the voltage by absorbing the peaks and
filling in the valleys.
 A capacitor can block DC voltage. If you hook a small capacitor to a battery, then
no current will flow between the poles of the battery once the capacitor charges.
However, any alternating current (AC) signal flows through a capacitor
unimpeded. That's because the capacitor will charge and discharge as the
alternating current fluctuates, making it appear that the alternating current is
flowing.

In the next section, we'll look at the history of the capacitor and how some of the most
brilliant minds contributed to its progress.

History of the Capacitor

The invention of the capacitor varies somewhat depending on who you ask. There are
records that indicate a German scientist named Ewald Georg von Kleist invented the
capacitor in November 1745. Several months later Pieter van Musschenbroek, a Dutch
professor at the University of Leyden came up with a very similar device in the form of
the Leyden jar, which is typically credited as the first capacitor. Since Kleist didn't have
detailed records and notes, nor the notoriety of his Dutch counterpart, he's often
overlooked as a contributor to the capacitor's evolution. However, over the years, both
have been given equal credit as it was established that their research was independent of
each other and merely a scientific coincidence [source: Williams].

The Leyden jar was a very simple device. It consisted of a glass jar, half filled with water
and lined inside and out with metal foil. The glass acted as the dielectric, although it was
thought for a time that water was the key ingredient. There was usually a metal wire or
chain driven through a cork in the top of the jar. The chain was then hooked to something
that would deliver a charge, most likely a hand-cranked static generator. Once delivered,
the jar would hold two equal but opposite charges in equilibrium until they were
connected with a wire, producing a slight spark or shock [source: Williams].

Benjamin Franklin worked with the Leyden jar in his experiments with electricity and
soon found that a flat piece of glass worked as well as the jar model, prompting him to
develop the flat capacitor, or Franklin square. Years later, English chemist Michael
Faraday would pioneer the first practical applications for the capacitor in trying to store
unused electrons from his experiments. This led to the first usable capacitor, made from
large oil barrels. Faraday's progress with capacitors is what eventually enabled us to
deliver electric power over great distances. As a result of Faraday's achievements in the
field of electricity, the unit of measurement for capacitors, or capacitance, became
known as the farad [source: Ramasamy].

For more information on capacitors and related topics, check out the links on the next
page.
How Inductors Work
by Marshall Brain

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Brain, Marshall. "How Inductors Work." 08 December 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/inductor.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Inductors Work

2. Inductor Basics
3. Henries

4. Inductor Application: Traffic Light Sensors

5. Lots More Information
6. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

 More Electronics Videos »

 Solid State Electronics Image Gallery

An inductor is little more than a coil of wire. See more pictures of solid state electronics.

Inductor Basics
In a circuit diagram, an inductor is shown like this:

To understand how an inductor can work in a circuit, this figure is helpful:

What you see here is a battery, a light bulb, a coil of wire around a piece of iron (yellow)
and a switch. The coil of wire is an inductor. If you have read How Electromagnets
Work, you might recognize that the inductor is an electromagnet.

If you were to take the inductor out of this circuit, what you would have is a normal
flashlight. You close the switch and the bulb lights up. With the inductor in the circuit as
shown, the behavior is completely different.
Think About Water...

One way to visualize the action of an inductor is to imagine a narrow channel with water flowing
through it, and a heavy water wheel that has its paddles dipping into the channel. Imagine that the
water in the channel is not flowing initially.

Now you try to start the water flowing. The paddle wheel will tend to prevent the water from flowing
until it has come up to speed with the water. If you then try to stop the flow of water in the channel,
the spinning water wheel will try to keep the water moving until its speed of rotation slows back
down to the speed of the water. An inductor is doing the same thing with the flow of electrons in a
wire -- an inductor resists a change in the flow of electrons.

The light bulb is a resistor (the resistance creates heat to make the filament in the bulb
glow -- see How Light Bulbs Work for details). The wire in the coil has much lower
resistance (it's just wire), so what you would expect when you turn on the switch is for
the bulb to glow very dimly. Most of the current should follow the low-resistance path
through the loop. What happens instead is that when you close the switch, the bulb burns
brightly and then gets dimmer. When you open the switch, the bulb burns very brightly
and then quickly goes out.

The reason for this strange behavior is the inductor. When current first starts flowing in
the coil, the coil wants to build up a magnetic field. While the field is building, the coil
inhibits the flow of current. Once the field is built, current can flow normally through the
wire. When the switch gets opened, the magnetic field around the coil keeps current
flowing in the coil until the field collapses. This current keeps the bulb lit for a period of
time even though the switch is open. In other words, an inductor can store energy in its
magnetic field, and an inductor tends to resist any change in the amount of current
flowing through it.

Henries
The capacity of an inductor is controlled by four factors:

 The number of coils - More coils means more inductance.

 The material that the coils are wrapped around (the core)
 The cross-sectional area of the coil - More area means more inductance.
 The length of the coil - A short coil means narrower (or overlapping) coils, which
means more inductance.

Putting iron in the core of an inductor gives it much more inductance than air or any non-
magnetic core would.

The standard unit of inductance is the henry. The equation for calculating the number of
henries in an inductor is:

H = (4 * Pi * #Turns * #Turns * coil Area * mu) / (coil Length * 10,000,000)

 The area and length of the coil are in meters. The term mu is the permeability of the
core. Air has a permeability of 1, while steel might have a permeability of 2,000.

Inductor Application: Traffic Light

Sensors
Let's say you take a coil of wire perhaps 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter, containing five or
six loops of wire. You cut some grooves in a road and place the coil in the grooves. You
attach an inductance meter to the coil and see what the inductance of the coil is.

Now you park a car over the coil and check the inductance again. The inductance will be
much larger because of the large steel object positioned in the loop's magnetic field. The
car parked over the coil is acting like the core of the inductor, and its presence changes
the inductance of the coil. Most traffic light sensors use the loop in this way. The sensor
constantly tests the inductance of the loop in the road, and when the inductance rises it
knows there is a car waiting!

Usually you use a much smaller coil. One big use of inductors is to team them up with
capacitors to create oscillators. See How Oscillators Work for details.

For more information on inductors and related topics, check out the links on the next
page.
How Electric Motors Work
by Marshall Brain

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Brain, Marshall. "How Electric Motors Work." 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/motor.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Electric Motors Work

2. Inside an Electric Motor
3. Toy Motor

4. More Motor Parts

5. Electromagnets and Motors
6. Armature, Commutator and Brushes
7. See more »
7. Putting It All Together
8. Motors Everywhere!
9. Lots More Information
10. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

 More Electronics Videos »

Electronic Parts Image Gallery

©iStockphoto.com/sethuphoto
Electric motors are everywhere. See more electronic parts pictures.

Electric motors are everywhere! In your house, almost every mechanical movement that
you see around you is caused by an AC (alternating current) or DC (direct current)
electric motor.

A simple motor has six parts:

 Armature or rotor
 Commutator
 Brushes
 Axle
 Field magnet
 DC power supply of some sort

More on Motors
 Electric Motor Quiz
 Brushless Motor

 Discovery.com: NanoMotor

By understanding how a motor works you can learn a lot about magnets, electromagnets
and electricity in general. In this article, you will learn what makes electric motors tick.

Inside an Electric Motor

An electric motor is all about magnets and magnetism: A motor uses magnets to create
motion. If you have ever played with magnets you know about the fundamental law of all
magnets: Opposites attract and likes repel. So if you have two bar magnets with their
ends marked "north" and "south," then the north end of one magnet will attract the south
end of the other. On the other hand, the north end of one magnet will repel the north end
of the other (and similarly, south will repel south). Inside an electric motor, these
attracting and repelling forces create rotational motion.

Parts of an electric motor.

In the above diagram, you can see two magnets in the motor: The armature (or rotor) is
an electromagnet, while the field magnet is a permanent magnet (the field magnet could
be an electromagnet as well, but in most small motors it isn't in order to save power).

Toy Motor
The motor being dissected here is a simple electric motor that you would typically find in
a toy:
You can see that this is a small motor, about as big around as a dime. From the outside
you can see the steel can that forms the body of the motor, an axle, a nylon end cap and
two battery leads. If you hook the battery leads of the motor up to a flashlight battery, the
axle will spin. If you reverse the leads, it will spin in the opposite direction. Here are two
other views of the same motor. (Note the two slots in the side of the steel can in the
second shot -- their purpose will become more evident in a moment.)
The nylon end cap is held in place by two tabs that are part of the steel can. By bending
the tabs back, you can free the end cap and remove it. Inside the end cap are the motor's
brushes. These brushes transfer power from the battery to the commutator as the motor
spins:
More Motor Parts
The axle holds the armature and the commutator. The armature is a set of electromagnets,
in this case three. The armature in this motor is a set of thin metal plates stacked together,
with thin copper wire coiled around each of the three poles of the armature. The two ends
of each wire (one wire for each pole) are soldered onto a terminal, and then each of the
three terminals is wired to one plate of the commutator. The figures below make it easy to
see the armature, terminals and commutator:
The final piece of any DC electric motor is the field magnet. The field magnet in this
motor is formed by the can itself plus two curved permanent magnets:
One end of each magnet rests against a slot cut into the can, and then the retaining clip
presses against the other ends of both magnets.

Electromagnets and Motors

To understand how an electric motor works, the key is to understand how the
electromagnet works. (See How Electromagnets Work for complete details.)

An electromagnet is the basis of an electric motor. You can understand how things work
in the motor by imagining the following scenario. Say that you created a simple
electromagnet by wrapping 100 loops of wire around a nail and connecting it to a battery.
The nail would become a magnet and have a north and south pole while the battery is
connected.

Now say that you take your nail electromagnet, run an axle through the middle of it and
suspend it in the middle of a horseshoe magnet as shown in the figure below. If you were
to attach a battery to the electromagnet so that the north end of the nail appeared as
shown, the basic law of magnetism tells you what would happen: The north end of the
electromagnet would be repelled from the north end of the horseshoe magnet and
attracted to the south end of the horseshoe magnet. The south end of the electromagnet
would be repelled in a similar way. The nail would move about half a turn and then stop
in the position shown.
 Electromagnet in a horseshoe magnet

You can see that this half-turn of motion is simply due to the way magnets naturally
attract and repel one another. The key to an electric motor is to then go one step further so
that, at the moment that this half-turn of motion completes, the field of the electromagnet
flips. The flip causes the electromagnet to complete another half-turn of motion. You flip
the magnetic field just by changing the direction of the electrons flowing in the wire (you
do that by flipping the battery over). If the field of the electromagnet were flipped at
precisely the right moment at the end of each half-turn of motion, the electric motor
would spin freely.

Armature, Commutator and Brushes

Armature
Consider the image on the previous page. The armature takes the place of the nail in an
electric motor. The armature is an electromagnet made by coiling thin wire around two or
more poles of a metal core.

The armature has an axle, and the commutator is attached to the axle. In the diagram to
the right, you can see three different views of the same armature: front, side and end-on.
In the end-on view, the winding is eliminated to make the commutator more obvious. You
can see that the commutator is simply a pair of plates attached to the axle. These plates
provide the two connections for the coil of the electromagnet.

The "flipping the electric field" part of an electric motor is accomplished by two parts:
the commutator and the brushes.

Commutator and brushes

Putting It All Together

When you put all of these parts together, what you have is a complete electric motor:

Armature
In this figure, the armature winding has been left out so that it is easier to see the
commutator in action. The key thing to notice is that as the armature passes through the
horizontal position, the poles of the electromagnet flip. Because of the flip, the north pole
of the electromagnet is always above the axle so it can repel the field magnet's north pole
and attract the field magnet's south pole.

If you ever have the chance to take apart a small electric motor, you will find that it
contains the same pieces described above: two small permanent magnets, a commutator,
two brushes, and an electromagnet made by winding wire around a piece of metal.
Almost always, however, the rotor will have three poles rather than the two poles as
shown in this article. There are two good reasons for a motor to have three poles:

 It causes the motor to have better dynamics. In a two-pole motor, if the

electromagnet is at the balance point, perfectly horizontal between the two poles
of the field magnet when the motor starts, you can imagine the armature getting
"stuck" there. That never happens in a three-pole motor.
 Each time the commutator hits the point where it flips the field in a two-pole
motor, the commutator shorts out the battery (directly connects the positive and
negative terminals) for a moment. This shorting wastes energy and drains the
battery needlessly. A three-pole motor solves this problem as well.

It is possible to have any number of poles, depending on the size of the motor and the
specific application it is being used in.
How Oscillators Work
by Marshall Brain

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Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks article:

Brain, Marshall. "How Oscillators Work." 08 December 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/oscillator.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Oscillators Work

2. Oscillation Basics
3. Oscillator Circuits

4. Resonators
5. Lots More Information
6. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

 More Electronics Videos »

 Inside Electronics Pictures

Oscillators produce electronic signals. See more pictures of what's inside electronics.

Oscillators are important in many different types of electronic equipment. For example, a
quartz watch uses a quartz oscillator to keep track of what time it is. An AM radio
transmitter uses an oscillator to create the carrier wave for the station, and an AM radio
receiver uses a special form of oscillator called a resonator to tune in a station. There are
oscillators in computers, metal detectors and even stun guns.

Inside Electronics
 Capacitors
 Electronic Gates

 Discovery.com: Organic Electronics

To understand how electronic oscillators work, it is helpful to look at examples from the
physical world. In this article, you'll learn the basic idea behind oscillators and how
they're used in electronics.

Oscillation Basics
One of the most commonly used oscillators is the pendulum of a clock. If you push on a
pendulum to start it swinging, it will oscillate at some frequency -- it will swing back
and forth a certain number of times per second. The length of the pendulum is the main
thing that controls the frequency.

For something to oscillate, energy needs to move back and forth between two forms. For
example, in a pendulum, energy moves between potential energy and kinetic energy.
When the pendulum is at one end of its travel, its energy is all potential energy and it is
ready to fall. When the pendulum is in the middle of its cycle, all of its potential energy
turns into kinetic energy and the pendulum is moving as fast as it can. As the pendulum
moves toward the other end of its swing, all the kinetic energy turns back into potential
energy. This movement of energy between the two forms is what causes the oscillation.

Eventually, any physical oscillator stops moving because of friction. To keep it going,
you have to add a little bit of energy on each cycle. In a pendulum clock, the energy that
keeps the pendulum moving comes from the spring. The pendulum gets a little push on
each stroke to make up for the energy it loses to friction. See How Pendulum Clocks
Work for details.

An electronic oscillator works on the same principle.

Oscillator Circuits
Energy needs to move back and forth from one form to another for an oscillator to work.
You can make a very simple oscillator by connecting a capacitor and an inductor together.
If you've read How Capacitors Work and How Inductors Work, you know that both
capacitors and inductors store energy. A capacitor stores energy in the form of an
electrostatic field, while an inductor uses a magnetic field.

Imagine the following circuit:

If you charge up the capacitor with a battery and then insert the inductor into the circuit,
here's what will happen:

 The capacitor will start to discharge through the inductor. As it does, the inductor
will create a magnetic field.
 Once the capacitor discharges, the inductor will try to keep the current in the
circuit moving, so it will charge up the other plate of the capacitor.
 Once the inductor's field collapses, the capacitor has been recharged (but with the
opposite polarity), so it discharges again through the inductor.

This oscillation will continue until the circuit runs out of energy due to resistance in the
wire. It will oscillate at a frequency that depends on the size of the inductor and the
capacitor.
Resonators
In a simple crystal radio (see How Radio Works for details), a capacitor/inductor
oscillator acts as the tuner for the radio. It is connected to an antenna and ground like
this:

Thousands of sine waves from different radio stations hit the antenna. The capacitor and
inductor want to resonate at one particular frequency. The sine wave that matches that
particular frequency will get amplified by the resonator, and all of the other frequencies
will be ignored.

In a radio, either the capacitor or the inductor in the resonator is adjustable. When you
turn the tuner knob on the radio, you are adjusting, for example, a variable capacitor.
Varying the capacitor changes the resonant frequency of the resonator and therefore
changes the frequency of the sine wave that the resonator amplifies. This is how you
"tune in" different stations on the radio!

For more information, check out the links on the next page.
How Relays Work
by Madeline Bullock

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Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks article:

Bullock, Madeline. "How Relays Work." 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/relay.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Relays Work

2. Relay Construction
3. Relay Applications

4. Lots More Information

5. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

 More Electronics Videos »

 Electronic Parts Image Gallery
Related Articles
 Electromagnets
 Boolean Logic

 Discovery.com: Most Powerful Magnet

A relay is a simple electromechanical switch made up of an electromagnet and a set of

contacts. Relays are found hidden in all sorts of devices. In fact, some of the first
computers ever built used relays to implement Boolean gates.

In this article, we will look at how relays work and a few of their applications.

Relay Construction
Relays are amazingly simple devices. There are four parts in every relay:
 Electromagnet
 Armature that can be attracted by the electromagnet
 Spring
 Set of electrical contacts

The following figure shows these four parts in action:

 Your browser does not
support JavaScript or it is disabled.

In this figure, you can see that a relay consists of two separate and completely
independent circuits. The first is at the bottom and drives the electromagnet. In this
circuit, a switch is controlling power to the electromagnet. When the switch is on, the
electromagnet is on, and it attracts the armature (blue). The armature is acting as a switch
in the second circuit. When the electromagnet is energized, the armature completes the
second circuit and the light is on. When the electromagnet is not energized, the spring
pulls the armature away and the circuit is not complete. In that case, the light is dark.

When you purchase relays, you generally have control over several variables:

 The voltage and current that is needed to activate the armature

 The maximum voltage and current that can run through the armature and the
armature contacts
 The number of armatures (generally one or two)
 The number of contacts for the armature (generally one or two -- the relay shown
here has two, one of which is unused)
 Whether the contact (if only one contact is provided) is normally open (NO) or
normally closed (NC)

Relay Applications
In general, the point of a relay is to use a small amount of power in the electromagnet --
coming, say, from a small dashboard switch or a low-power electronic circuit -- to move
an armature that is able to switch a much larger amount of power. For example, you
might want the electromagnet to energize using 5 volts and 50 milliamps (250
milliwatts), while the armature can support 120V AC at 2 amps (240 watts).
Relays are quite common in home appliances where there is an electronic control turning
on something like a motor or a light. They are also common in cars, where the 12V
supply voltage means that just about everything needs a large amount of current. In later
model cars, manufacturers have started combining relay panels into the fuse box to make
maintenance easier. For example, the six gray boxes in this photo of a Ford Windstar fuse
box are all relays:

In places where a large amount of power needs to be switched, relays are often cascaded.
In this case, a small relay switches the power needed to drive a much larger relay, and
that second relay switches the power to drive the load.
Relays can also be used to implement Boolean logic. See How Boolean Logic Works for
more information.

For more on relays and related topics, check out the links on the next page.
How Semiconductors Work
by Marshall Brain

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Brain, Marshall. "How Semiconductors Work." 25 April 2001. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/diode.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Semiconductors Work

2. Doping Silicon
3. Diodes and Transistors

4. Lots More Information

5. See all Solid State Electronics articles

Battery Videos

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Electronics Parts Image Gallery

 Clockwise from top: A chip, an LED and a transistor are all made from semiconductor
material. See more electronics parts pictures.

Semiconductors have had a monumental impact on our society. You find semiconductors
at the heart of microprocessor chips as well as transistors. Anything that's computerized
or uses radio waves depends on semiconductors.

Today, most semiconductor chips and transistors are created with silicon. You may have
heard expressions like "Silicon Valley" and the "silicon economy," and that's why --
silicon is the heart of any electronic device.

A diode is the simplest possible semiconductor device, and is therefore an excellent

beginning point if you want to understand how semiconductors work. In this article,
you'll learn what a semiconductor is, how doping works and how a diode can be created
using semiconductors. But first, let's take a close look at silicon.

Silicon is a very common element -- for example, it is the main element in sand and
quartz. If you look "silicon" up in the periodic table, you will find that it sits next to
aluminum, below carbon and above germanium.
 Silicon sits next to aluminum and below carbon in the
periodic table.

Carbon, silicon and germanium (germanium, like silicon, is also a semiconductor) have a
unique property in their electron structure -- each has four electrons in its outer orbital.
This allows them to form nice crystals. The four electrons form perfect covalent bonds
with four neighboring atoms, creating a lattice. In carbon, we know the crystalline form
as diamond. In silicon, the crystalline form is a silvery, metallic-looking substance.
 In a silicon lattice, all silicon atoms bond perfectly to four
neighbors, leaving no free electrons to conduct electric current.
This makes a silicon crystal an insulator rather than a conductor.

Inside Electronics
 LEDs
 Capacitors

 Electronic Gates

Metals tend to be good conductors of electricity because they usually have "free
electrons" that can move easily between atoms, and electricity involves the flow of
electrons. While silicon crystals look metallic, they are not, in fact, metals. All of the
outer electrons in a silicon crystal are involved in perfect covalent bonds, so they can't
move around. A pure silicon crystal is nearly an insulator -- very little electricity will
flow through it.

But you can change all this through a process called doping.

Doping Silicon
You can change the behavior of silicon and turn it into a conductor by doping it. In
doping, you mix a small amount of an impurity into the silicon crystal.
There are two types of impurities:

 N-type - In N-type doping, phosphorus or arsenic is added to the silicon in small

quantities. Phosphorus and arsenic each have five outer electrons, so they're out of
place when they get into the silicon lattice. The fifth electron has nothing to bond
to, so it's free to move around. It takes only a very small quantity of the impurity
to create enough free electrons to allow an electric current to flow through the
silicon. N-type silicon is a good conductor. Electrons have a negative charge,
hence the name N-type.
 P-type - In P-type doping, boron or gallium is the dopant. Boron and gallium each
have only three outer electrons. When mixed into the silicon lattice, they form
"holes" in the lattice where a silicon electron has nothing to bond to. The absence
of an electron creates the effect of a positive charge, hence the name P-type.
Holes can conduct current. A hole happily accepts an electron from a neighbor,
moving the hole over a space. P-type silicon is a good conductor.

A minute amount of either N-type or P-type doping turns a silicon crystal from a good
insulator into a viable (but not great) conductor -- hence the name "semiconductor."
N-type and P-type silicon are not that amazing by themselves; but when you put them
together, you get some very interesting behavior at the junction. That's what happens in a
diode.

A diode is the simplest possible semiconductor device. A diode allows current to flow in
one direction but not the other. You may have seen turnstiles at a stadium or a subway
station that let people go through in only one direction. A diode is a one-way turnstile for
electrons.

When you put N-type and P-type silicon together as shown in this diagram, you get a
very interesting phenomenon that gives a diode its unique properties.

Even though N-type silicon by itself is a conductor, and P-type silicon by itself is also a
conductor, the combination shown in the diagram does not conduct any electricity. The
negative electrons in the N-type silicon get attracted to the positive terminal of the
battery. The positive holes in the P-type silicon get attracted to the negative terminal of
the battery. No current flows across the junction because the holes and the electrons are
each moving in the wrong direction.

If you flip the battery around, the diode conducts electricity just fine. The free electrons
in the N-type silicon are repelled by the negative terminal of the battery. The holes in the
P-type silicon are repelled by the positive terminal. At the junction between the N-type
and P-type silicon, holes and free electrons meet. The electrons fill the holes. Those holes
and free electrons cease to exist, and new holes and electrons spring up to take their
place. The effect is that current flows through the junction.

In the next section we'll look at the uses for diodes and transistors.
Diodes and Transistors
A device that blocks current in one direction while letting current flow in another
direction is called a diode. Diodes can be used in a number of ways. For example, a
device that uses batteries often contains a diode that protects the device if you insert the
batteries backward. The diode simply blocks any current from leaving the battery if it is
reversed -- this protects the sensitive electronics in the device.

A semiconductor diode's behavior is not perfect, as shown in this graph:

When reverse-biased, an ideal diode would block all current. A real diode lets perhaps
10 microamps through -- not a lot, but still not perfect. And if you apply enough reverse
voltage (V), the junction breaks down and lets current through. Usually, the breakdown
voltage is a lot more voltage than the circuit will ever see, so it is irrelevant.

When forward-biased, there is a small amount of voltage necessary to get the diode
going. In silicon, this voltage is about 0.7 volts. This voltage is needed to start the hole-
electron combination process at the junction.

Another monumental technology that's related to the diode is the transistor. Transistors
and diodes have a lot in common.

Transistors
A transistor is created by using three layers rather than the two layers used in a diode.
You can create either an NPN or a PNP sandwich. A transistor can act as a switch or an
amplifier.
A transistor looks like two diodes back-to-back. You'd imagine that no current could flow
through a transistor because back-to-back diodes would block current both ways. And
this is true. However, when you apply a small current to the center layer of the
sandwich, a much larger current can flow through the sandwich as a whole. This gives a
transistor its switching behavior. A small current can turn a larger current on and off.

A silicon chip is a piece of silicon that can hold thousands of transistors. With transistors
acting as switches, you can create Boolean gates, and with Boolean gates you can create
microprocessor chips.

The natural progression from silicon to doped silicon to transistors to chips is what has
made microprocessors and other electronic devices so inexpensive and ubiquitous in
today's society. The fundamental principles are surprisingly simple. The miracle is the
constant refinement of those principles to the point where, today, tens of millions of
transistors can be inexpensively formed onto a single chip.

For more information on semiconductors, diodes, chips and more, check out the links on
the next page.
How Transistors Work
by Nathan Chandler

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Chandler, Nathan. "How Transistors Work." 01 January 2001. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/transistor.htm> 10 June 2010.

Inside this Article

1. Introduction to How Transistors Work

2. What exactly is a transistor, anyway?
3. Transistor Radios and the Electronics Revolution

4. Transistors and the Computer Age

5. Transistors Yesterday And Today
6. Lots More Information
7. See more »
7. See all Solid State Electronics articles

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Electronic Parts Image Gallery

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The Bell Labs team of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley won the
1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in developing transistors. See more electronic
parts pictures.

If cells are the building blocks of life, transistors are the building blocks of the digital
revolution. Without transistors, the technological wonders you use every day -- cell
phones, computers, cars -- would be vastly different, if they existed at all.

Before transistors, product engineers used vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches
to complete electrical circuits. Tubes were far from ideal. They had to warm up before
they worked (and sometimes overheated when they did), they were unreliable and bulky
and they used too much energy. Everything from televisions, to telephone systems, to
early computers used these components, but in the years after World War II, scientists
were looking for alternatives to vacuum tubes. They'd soon find their answer from work
done decades earlier.

In the late 1920's, Polish American physicist Julius Lilienfeld filed patents for a three-
electrode device made from copper sulfide. There's no evidence that he actually created
the component, but his research helped develop what today is a field effect transistor, the
building block of silicon chips.

Twenty years after Lilienfeld filed his patents, scientists were trying to put his ideas to
practical use. The Bell Telephone System, in particular, needed something better than
vacuum tubes to keep its communications systems working. The company assembled
what amounted to an all-star team of scientific minds, including John Bardeen, Walter
Brattain and William Shockley, and put them to work researching vacuum tube
substitutes.
In 1947, Shockley was director of transistor research at Bell Telephone Labs. Brattain
was an authority on solid-state physics as well as expert on nature of atomic structure of
solids and Bardeen was an electrical engineer and physicist. Within a year, Bardeen and
Brittain used the element germanium to create an amplifying circuit, also called a point-
contact transistor. Soon afterward, Shockley improved on their idea by developing a
junction transistor.

More on Solid State

 How Semiconductors Work
 Capacitors Quiz

 How Electronic Gates Work

The next year, Bell Labs announced to the world that it had invented working transistors.
The original patent name for the first transistor went by this description: Semiconductor
amplifier; three-electrode circuit element utilizing semi conductive materials. It was an
innocuous-sounding phrase. But this invention netted the Bell team the 1956 Nobel Prize
for Physics, and allowed scientists and product engineers far greater control over the flow
of electricity.

It's no exaggeration that transistors have enabled some of humankind's biggest leaps in
technology. Keep reading to see exactly how transistors work, how they altered the
course of technology, and in the process, human history, too.

What exactly is a transistor, anyway?

EyesWideOpen/Getty Images
Transistors enable the design of a huge array of technological feats that were impossible
with vacuum tubes.

Transistors are devices that control the movement of electrons, and consequently,
electricity. They work something like a water faucet -- not only do they start and stop the
flow of a current, but they also control the amount of the current. With electricity,
transistors can both switch or amplify electronic signals, letting you control current
moving through a circuit board with precision.

The transistors made at Bell Labs were initially made from the element germanium.
Scientists there knew pure germanium was a good insulator. But adding impurities (a
process called doping) changed the germanium into a weak conductor, or
semiconductor. Semiconductors are materials that have properties in-between insulators
and conductors, allowing electrical conductivity in varying degrees.

The timing of the invention of transistors was no accident. To work properly, transistors
require pure semiconductor materials. It just so happened that right after World War II,
improvements in germanium refinement, as well as advances in doping, made germanium
suitable for semiconductor applications.

Depending on the element used for doping, the resulting germanium layer was either
negative type (N-type), or positive type (P-type). In an N-type layer, the doping element
added electrons to the germanium, making it easier for electrons to surge out. Conversely,
in a P-type layer, specific doping elements caused the germanium to lose electrons, thus,
electrons from adjacent materials flowed towards it.

Place the N-type and P-type adjacent to each other and you create a P-N diode. This
diode allows an electrical current to flow, but in only one direction, a useful property in
the construction of electronic circuits.

Full-fledged transistors were the next step. To create transistors, engineers layered doped
germanium to make two layers back to back, in a configuration of either P-N-P or N-P-N.
The point of contact was called a junction, thus the name junction transistor.

With an electrical current applied to the center layer (called the base), electrons will move
from the N-type side to the P-type side. The initial small trickle acts as a switch that
allows much larger current to flow. In an electric circuit, this means that transistors are
acting as both a switch and an amplifier.

These days, in place of germanium, commercial electronics use silicon-based

semiconductors, which are more reliable and more affordable than germanium-based
transistors. But once the technology caught on, germanium transistors were in widespread
use for more than 20 years.

Transistor Radios and the Electronics

Revolution
Transistors work primarily as switches and amplifiers. Given those functions, it's no
surprise that sound-related devices were the first commercial products to use transistors.
In 1952, transistorized hearing aids hit the market. These were niche products, though,
compared to transistor radios that emerged in 1954. Radios exposed manufacturers and
consumers alike to the revolutionizing potential of transistors.

The function of transistors in radios is straightforward. Sounds are recorded through a

microphone and turned into electrical signals. Those signals travel through a circuit, and
the transistor amplifies the signal, which is subsequently much louder when it reaches a
speaker.

Convincing manufacturers that this basic concept would work on mass-produced

products, however, wasn't such a simple task. In 1954, transistors were proven but novel
electronic components. Device manufacturers had been using vacuum tubes profitably for
many years, so they were understandably leery about switching to transistors.

But Pat Haggerty, vice president at a company called Texas Instruments, was convinced
that transistors were going to revolutionize the electronics industry. Texas Instruments
used Bell Labs' breakthroughs in germanium transistors to develop a small, pocket-sized
transistor radio, with the help of a small Indiana company named IDEA. Together, the
two companies created a radio called the Regency TR-1, which was announced on Oct.
18, 1954.

From start to finish, the race to create the TR-1 required innovative new parts that would
fit inside a pocket-sized case, which would be small enough to really capture the world's
attention. The speaker, capacitors, and other components were created just for this
project. The transistors, though, were what really made the project possible.

Texas Instruments devised processes for mass-producing transistors for their radios, and
in the process, proved that transistors and their subsequent products could be affordable,
more portable and more effective than vacuum tubes. Within a year, other companies,
such as Emerson, General Electric and Raytheon, all began selling transistor-based
products. The modern electronics boom had begun.

Transistors and the Computer Age

Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Without transistors, engineers might never have created amazingly small and power
digital products.

Once mass-produced transistorized hearing aids and radios became realities, engineers
realized that transistors would replace vacuum tubes in computers, too. One of the first
pre-transistor computers, the famous ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer) weighed 30 tons, thanks in part to its more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. It was
obvious that transistors would completely change computer engineering and result in
smaller machines.

Germanium transistors certainly helped start the computer age, but silicon transistors
revolutionized computer design and spawned an entire industry in California's aptly-
named Silicon Valley.

In 1954, George Teal, a scientist at Texas Instruments, created the first silicon transistor.
Soon after, manufacturers developed methods for mass-producing silicon transistors,
which were cheaper and more reliable than germanium-based transistors.

Silicon transistors worked wonderfully for computer production. With smart engineering,
transistors helped computers power through huge numbers of calculations in a short time.
The simple switch operation of transistors is what enables your computer to complete
massively complex tasks. In a computer chip, transistors switch between two binary
states -- 0 and 1. This is the language of computers. One computer chip can have millions
of transistors continually switching, helping complete complex calculations.

In a computer chip, the transistors aren't isolated, individual components. They're part of
what's called an integrated circuit (also known as a microchip), in which many
transistors work in concert to help the computer complete calculations. An integrated
circuit is one piece of semiconductor material loaded with transistors and other electronic
components.
Computers use those currents in tandem with Boolean algebra to make simple decisions.
With many transistors, a computer can make many simple decisions very quickly, and
thus perform complex calculations very quickly, too.

Computers need millions or even billions of transistors to complete tasks. Thanks to the
reliability and incredibly small size of individual transistors, which are much smaller than
the diameter of a single human hair, engineers can pack an unfathomable number of
transistors into a wide array of computer and computer-related products.

Transistors Yesterday And Today

Stockbyte/Getty Images
Manufacturers quickly stamp components onto semiconductor material to save time and
money.

In the 1960s and 1970s, transistorized products mostly used the fundamental junction
transistor design developed by Bell Labs. Advances in silicon development in the 1970s
led to metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET). MOSFETs
utilize the same principles as other transistors, but the N- and P-types of silicon are less
expensive, are arranged differently and are doped with other types of metals and oxides,
depending on the intended use.

There are many other transistor types, too. Engineers categorize transistors by their
semiconductor material, application, structure, power ratings, operating frequencies and
other variables. As technology advanced, engineers learned that they could manufacture
many transistors simultaneously, on the same piece of semiconductor material, along with
other components like capacitors and resistors.
The result is what's called an integrated circuit. These circuits, usually called just
"chips," contain billions of infinitesimal transistors. Since the 1960s, the number of
transistors per unit area has been doubling every 1.5 years, meaning engineers can cram
more of them into smaller and smaller products.

Modern silicon commercial transistors may be smaller than 45 nanometers in size.

They're so small that NVDIA's new graphics card (codenamed GF100) has more than 3
billion transistors, the most ever jammed into one chip. And these transistors are
behemoths compared to what's coming in the future.

Scientists from Yale and South Korea recently created the world's first molecular
transistor, which is made from a single benzene molecule. Although the tiny size is
amazing, engineers stress that they're not concerned so much with bulk as they are
efficiency. Contemporary chips create a lot of wasted heat because their transistors don't
pass along energy as efficiently as product makers would like; molecular transistors may
hold the key to improving efficiency in big ways.

Transistor materials are changing, too, thanks to recent advances in a material called
graphene. Graphene transfers electrons much faster than silicon, and could lead to
computer processors that are 1,000 times faster than silicon-based products.

No matter where development goes, it's certain that transistors will continue to drive
product research and technological advances we can't yet even begin to imagine.
Computers will become faster, cheaper and more reliable. Cell phones and music players
will shrink to super-tiny dimensions, and still cost less than previous models.

That's the power of transistors in altering the landscape of technology, and ultimately, of
our society as a whole. Not a bad run for a simple device invented more than 60 years
ago.