Engineering

Converting Wi-Fi signals to electricity with new 2-D materials

Imagine a world where smartphones, laptops, wearables, and other electronics are powered without batteries. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have taken a step in that direction, with the first fully flexible device that ...

Hardware

Accelerating sustainable semiconductors with 'multielement ink'

Semiconductors are the heart of almost every electronic device. Without semiconductors, our computers would not be able to process and retain data; and LED (light-emitting diode) lightbulbs would lose their ability to shine.

Hi Tech & Innovation

FingerShadow is proposed as screen power-saving technique

With all the new-version features and form-factor advances in smartphones, a common problem still remains, and that is power. Displays place a strain on battery life. Advances in the Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) screen ...

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Diode

In electronics, a diode is a two-terminal device (thermionic diodes may also have one or two ancillary terminals for a heater).

Diodes have two active electrodes between which the signal of interest may flow, and most are used for their unidirectional electric current property. The varicap diode is used as an electrically adjustable capacitor.

The unidirectionality most diodes exhibit is sometimes generically called the rectifying property. The most common function of a diode is to allow an electric current in one direction (called the forward biased condition) and to block the current in the opposite direction (the reverse biased condition). Thus, the diode can be thought of as an electronic version of a check valve.

Real diodes do not display such a perfect on-off directionality but have a more complex non-linear electrical characteristic, which depends on the particular type of diode technology. Diodes also have many other functions in which they are not designed to operate in this on-off manner.

Early diodes included “cat’s whisker” crystals and vacuum tube devices (also called thermionic valves). Today most diodes are made of silicon, but other semiconductors such a germanium are sometimes used.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA