Importance of Electronics and Electrical Subjects in Computer Engineering

Most of the  students pursuing engineering(or established in some IT companies) are confused that why did they study or studying subjects unrelated to computer science as they are going to become a computer engineer.why?As an engineering student you must ask.But unfurtunately the time has passed and we have already cleared those papers securing good grades.And throughout your life you will be questioning yourself about this.

But my article has something for you and after reading this I hope all your questions are going to be answered upto some extent.

As a computer science student I have found the following usefulness of electrical and electronics subjects.So read it carefully.

Basic Electronics

story of IBM computers

The story of IBM's hardware is intertwined with the story of the computer industry – from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits, to microprocessors and beyond.

Remember you have studies about the semiconducturs in the first Basic Electronics class.

All of you must have studied RAM(Random Access Memory) in computer architecture.The RAM itself is made up of semiconductur materials and it is the electrical power only that charges and discharges it, which we say 1 and 0.And the computer understands only 1's and 0's.

You must have studied a little about communication engineering and use of optical fibre cable in BE.That is so important which tells about how signal is tranmitted from one device to another.The device may be a computer also.The Optical fibre cable is the most used medium for signal transmission.And it is one of the important prospective of data communication and networking.

So by studying this subject you learned the building blocks of computer.

Digital Electronics Circuit

I think the importnce of this subject is very high in understanding the basics of a microprocessor and the computations inside computer.

The processor only can perform some fundamental operations like addition,division etc.And most of operations are performed using these basic operations.Everyone knows that computer understands on 0's and 1's.

Each type of operation in a microprocessor's instruction set is specified by an opcode, which is represented as a pattern of 1s and 0s. A compiler or interpreter translates code in a source language to machine code made up of those instructions.

For example, take this code, where a variable, x, is assigned the value of 50:

x = 50;

The compiler might translate that to the following assembly language, where the AX register (for the x variable) is set with the value, 50 (in hexidecimal), using the MOV instruction:

mov ax, 0x32

If the opcode for MOV was 0xA0 and the code for the AX register was 0xB then the machine code, in binary, would look like this:

10100000 00001011 00110010

So we need to study the basic operations of 0 and 1.So in DEC you studied the adder circuit,multiplexor,decoder etc. which are implimented inside the computer to perform these operations.The basic unit inside computer which performs these operations is called ALU(arithmetic and Logical Unit).

Another important thing is that all the data stored in disks resides in the form of 0' and 1's.So,how the data in different formats are converted into 0's and 1's is a big question.This is a thing which every computer engineer should know(must know).If you do not know then you are not supposed to be a world class computer engineer.So here is how it happens.

The Standard ASCII Character Set

Bytes are frequently used to hold individual characters in a text document. In the ASCII character set, each binary value between 0 and 127 is given a specific character. Most computers extend the ASCII character set to use the full range of 256 characters available in a byte. The upper 128 characters handle special things like accented characters from common foreign languages.

You can see the 127 standard ASCII codes below. Computers store text documents, both on disk and in memory, using these codes. For example, if you use Notepad in Windows to create a text file containing the words, "Four score and seven years ago," Notepad would use 1 byte of memory per character (including 1 byte for each space character between the words -- ASCII character 32). When Notepad stores the sentence in a file on disk, the file will also contain 1 byte per character and per space.

Try this experiment: Open up a new file in Notepad and insert the sentence, "Four score and seven years ago" in it. Save the file to disk under the name getty.txt. Then use the explorer and look at the size of the file. You will find that the file has a size of 30 bytes on disk: 1 byte for each character. If you add another word to the end of the sentence and re-save it, the file size will jump to the appropriate number of bytes. Each character consumes a byte.

If you were to look at the file as a computer looks at it, you would find that each byte contains not a letter but a number -- the number is the ASCII code corresponding to the character (see below). So on disk, the numbers for the file look like this:

F   o   u   r     a   n   d      s   e   v   e   n70 111 117 114 32 97 110 100 32 115 101 118 101 110

By looking in the ASCII table, you can see a one-to-one correspondence between each character and the ASCII code used. Note the use of 32 for a space -- 32 is the ASCII code for a space. We could expand these decimal numbers out to binary numbers (so 32 = 00100000) if we wanted to be technically correct -- that is how the computer really deals with things.

The first 32 values (0 through 31) are codes for things like carriage return and line feed. The space character is the 33rd value, followed by punctuation, digits, uppercase characters and lowercase characters. To see all 127 values, check out Unicode.org's chart.

Now a days the ASCII character set is replaced bu Unicode chracter set,which supports many languages.To know more about this visit http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html.

Basic Electrical Engineering and Network Theory

One of my favourite subject is BEE.You would have studies about capacitors,registers etc and their networks.I think now you can realise the importance of the registers and capacitors and how they are used to store data.So,studying their behaviours is so impotrant.

Analog Electronics Circuit

You must have read about transistors in AEC.

Read the wiki's description of transistors.

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals. It is made of a solid piece of semiconductor  material, with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be much more than the controlling (input) power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its release in the early 1950s the transistor revolutionised the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, amongst other things.

 

These are the things the teachers should explain the students before teaching the subject matter.Infact every teacher should explain the students that why they are studying the subject.

So keep asking why?

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