Back To Basics: Resistors Part 1

Posted under Back to Basics, Educational on December 29th, 2024 by

Ok, I wanted to create this for a long time but never got around to sitting down to compile my thoughts on it. I know this is as basic as it gets, but I still wanted to put out a series of posts on everything I know about resistors. Hey, for most in my circle, this might not be the most exciting series, but believe me, while researching this topic, I stumbled upon a few things I didn’t know even after 18 years in this field!

Let’s start then. At its core, resistance is the property of a material that opposes the flow of electric current. But what does that mean from first principles? Imagine a river flowing downstream. If there’s no obstruction, the water flows smoothly. Now add rocks, debris, and narrow passages, the flow slows down. In an electrical circuit, electrons are the water, the material of the conductor is the riverbed, and resistance is the obstruction caused by the material’s atomic structure.



Electric current flows because electrons are pushed through a conductor under the influence of an electric field. However, as these electrons move, they collide with atoms and other particles within the material. These collisions are what create resistance, converting some electrical energy into heat. More frequent the collisions, the higher the resistance.

This phenomenon is beautifully captured by Ohm’s Law, which states that V=IR, where V is the voltage difference, I is the current, and R is the resistance. It tells us how much current will flow for a given voltage across a resistor(Applicable only if the temperature is constant). Now Resistors are just physical devices specifically designed to exhibit and control this property. They are put in circuits to intentionally control current flow and divide voltages.

So, as simple as the concept of resistance may seem, it’s at the heart of almost everything in electronics. Everything on the planet has resistance. Hopefully, in the coming posts, I will like to explore resistors from every angle that I know of.

BTW: Did you know that the smallest resistor ever made is less than a nanometer in size and made of a single molecule?

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BackToBasics: Analog Computing

Posted under Back to Basics, Educational, Technology on December 22nd, 2024 by

I was doing some history reading on computing earlier this week and got hooked on the concept of analog computing. It’s fascinating to think about how this technology, that dates back several decades, is making a comeback even in the AI era.

First, the basics. Digital computing is all about 1s and 0s. Meaning you have an electrical signal and you convert it into digital domain via an ADC(Analog to Digital Converter) and do the rest of the process in mostly software. Although it has many good things going for it like its precise, configurable & repeatable, one of the main points is its slow(think conversion time) and power-hungry because of the extra steps needed.

This is where analog computing shines. Unlike digital, analog doesn’t use binary. It uses continuous signals, like voltages or currents, to represent and process information. It’s fluid, parallel, and highly efficient. For AI tasks, like neural network operations that involve lots of matrix math, analog systems can process data directly without all the energy-intensive conversions digital systems need. Its energy efficient and can perform computations at a fraction of the cost making them great for AI edge applications like sensors, cameras, wearables etc.

A company worth looking into is Mythic AI, which uses compute-in-memory technology. Here, matrix multiplications happen directly in the circuit, using analog signals. Imagine a DAC generating voltages across varying resistors; measuring the current in the line gives the multiplied result V=IR. This is a fundamental multiplication block. Scale this across a large node matrix, and you achieve fast, low-energy matrix operations without transferring data between memory and processor which cant be avoided in digital computing.

I think the future might be about combining the two to create systems that are both powerful and efficient. As of today, since the o3 release from OpenAI, I feel the only wall(if any) AI is going to hit, is the compute shortage wall, nothing else.

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