BOARDS
Conductors, Transistors, chips, IC, ASIC, boards, motherboard, mainboard, expansion cards, I/O cards... ACK!!!
What the HECK is InetDaemon talking about??
CONDUCTORS
Conductors can pass on an electric charge. The wires in your house are conductors.
Non-conductors are things that do not conduct electricity, like rubber or
wood, or silicon.
TRANSISTOR
Transistors get their name from the word 'resistor' and a little of creative
use of language. Transistors are special. They are called semi-conductors.
They resist the flow of electricity up to a certain point. When the current
gets strong enough, transistors 'transition' from a non-conducting state to
a conducting state. This ability to change between two states (low voltage
and high voltage) makes them useful for storing and processing information.
Transistors are the part of the computer that can temporarilly store information as an electrical charge. One transistor holds one 'bit' of information. They can also be used as 'gates' for logic processes. This lets us do things like AND & OR.
CHIPS
Computer chips are made out of silicon and other non-conducting compounds.
They look and feel like the tiles you use in flooring in your home, except
there are wires and transisters inside them. Another difference is that they
have metal pins sticking out of them, that make them look a little like oddly
shaped millipedes.
IC
IC equals "integraged chipset" or "integrated component".
This is a term usually used for describing a new chip that was once a set
of chips. In many computers today, multiple functions are being integrated
into a single chip. Chips are expensive to produce, so if you make a computer
product, the fewer chips you have to make, the cheaper the device becomes.
On really cheap computer systems, they actually integrate the sound, video
and I/O functions into the computer's main system board by placing all these
functions on one or two chips permanently sodered into the board. This does
tend to make things cheaper, but if one of those dandy multi-function chips
blows, the whole computer goes dead permanently.
DAUGHTER BOARD
This is the term used whenever a board plugs into another board.
When you want to plug a sound card into the mainboard, you could say that
you are adding a sound daughterboard, but you don't hear people use this term
much any more.
RISER BOARD
Riser boards are connected to the main board on the computer. It is used to
provide a means of connecting adaptor/daughter cards parallel to the mainboard
instead of perpendicular.
EXPANSION CARDS
As mentioned earlier, expansion cards expand the system. There are
different types of expansion cards based on the function they perform, and
how well they communicate with the rest of the system.
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