Zeros and Ones
To understand software topology we should understand basic electronic concept and imagine how computers work nowadays. Most important technological improvement of the history is the invention of transistor technology. Transistor is most basic switching component for electronics, transistors has too many different features but for electronic concept we only need to understand switching feature of transistors.
Transistors has three legs, if we apply voltage to the base leg, it allows current to flow from the collector leg to the emitter leg (BJT NPN transistors). This situation is true for BJT type NPN based transistors. As we can see there is a condition for current flow, this creates a true - false situation which is the meaning of 0–1 coding. For electronics 1 represents there is a voltage and 0 represents there is not a voltage. A logic system is created by looking for voltage, and trillions of 0–1 logical values connected to each other eventually form the structure we call the processor today. For example, we want to light a led, we trigger the transistor structure which controlling the led, if we control thousands of leds we can control simply a led display screen, in correct order we can print every thing we want. Imagine that you are controlling trillions of parameters similar to led controlling as a logical system with zeros and ones. Logic circuits are the basics of computer technologies so everything we are doing on computers has been based on simple logic circuits with transistors. To sum up, today we are using devices that based on very simple components, certainly this is not that simple, there are thousands of high-quality technologies but also we should remember that all new technologies based on the old-school systems.
Thank you for reading.
RESOURCES
- Morris Mano → Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals
- Sedra Smith → Microelectronic Circuits
