Digital electronics
electronic circuits representing signals by discrete bands of analog levels
Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. It deals with the relationship between binary inputs and outputs by passing electrical signals through logical gates, resistors, capacitors, amplifiers, and other electronic components. The field of digital electronics is in contrast to analog electronics, which work primarily with analog signals (signals with varying degrees of intensity as opposed to on/off two-state binary signals). Despite the name, digital electronics designs include important analog design considerations.
Large assemblies of logic gates, used to represent more complex ideas, are often packaged into integrated circuits. Complex devices may have simple electronic representations of Boolean logic functions.
History
The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (published in 1705), and he also established that by using the binary system, the principles of arithmetic and logic could be joined. Digital logic as we know it was the invention of George Boole in the mid-19th century. In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits. Eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations.
“Digital electronics” enters the record as electronic circuits representing signals by discrete bands of analog levels. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Digital, electronics and electronic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Digital electronics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.