R
Rodney Kelp
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
back to electron flow?
So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
Current flows [1] from positive to negative. Engineering and physics
schools never taught anything else. The military and some trade
schools taught electron flow, and may still. That confuses the hell
out of the poor students.
"Hole flow" happens in semiconductors.
John
[1] the usual fatheads will get prissy about the phrase "current
flows", of course.
Rodney Kelp said:So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are
they back to electron flow?
So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
Current flows [1] from positive to negative. Engineering and physics
schools never taught anything else. The military and some trade
schools taught electron flow, and may still. That confuses the hell
out of the poor students.
"Hole flow" happens in semiconductors.
John
[1] the usual fatheads will get prissy about the phrase "current
flows", of course.
No. The terms are "pedants" and perhaps "pissy".
And going back to
basic physics, we always talked about electrons accelerating in a
field and about charge per time. Since we were talking about the
charge of electrons, I always got the impression that we were
talking about negative to positive. The positive to negative
convention was introduced in electroncs.
Rodney Kelp said:So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
Active8 said:No. The terms are "pedants" and perhaps "pissy". And going back to
basic physics, we always talked about electrons accelerating in a
field and about charge per time. Since we were talking about the
charge of electrons, I always got the impression that we were
talking about negative to positive. The positive to negative
convention was introduced in electroncs.
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 11:23:05 -0500, "Rodney Kelp"
So, are they still teaching hole flow in electronics schools or are they
back to electron flow?
Current flows [1] from positive to negative. Engineering and physics
schools never taught anything else. The military and some trade
schools taught electron flow, and may still. That confuses the hell
out of the poor students.
"Hole flow" happens in semiconductors.
John
[1] the usual fatheads will get prissy about the phrase "current
flows", of course.
No. The terms are "pedants" and perhaps "pissy".
Nicely self-referential!
The positive to negative convention was introduced by Benjamin
Franklin a long time before electronics was invented or electrons were
discovered.
^^ Hey, Me. You're MeFor me
in beginning physics, we talked about electric fields as pointing
from a positive charge to negative charge, so that a positive test
charge will feel a force pushing it towards the negative charge.
This
morphs into positive charges flowing out the positive side of a battery,
the right rule giving you the right direction for the magnetic field set
up by that positive current, and so on. You could just as easily talk
about negative charges flowing the other way, and using a left hand rule
instead. That is if I say 6A is flowing from the right side of your
screen to the left, then that is either 6 A worth of positive charge is
flowing from right to left, 6 A worth of negative charge flows from left
to right. As the Circuits book I just finished they actually go to
great pains to establish that being consistent when working a problem is
the only thing that matters.
Hole flow is different, in that holes don't really flow in a
semi-conductor, right.
That is given a positive type semi-conductor
there are holes in the atoms making up the material, and electrons hop
in and out of the holes, the atoms being fixed in place, so the
appearance is that holes are flowing the opposite way through the
material. I never really had a formal electronics class (I always liked
the AoE approach where you don't really care about the internals of the
devices, but just how to make them useful), so maybe I'm wrong.
Craig
Someone mentioned that here and/or in an article on lightning.
Let me rephrase that. The positive to negative convention was
introduced to *me* in electroncs ...
As the Circuits book I just finished they actually go to
great pains to establish that being consistent when working a problem is
the only thing that matters.
Oh, of course. You're the only one who matters.