Passive Components for Circuit Design

Chapter 1

Fundamentals

For many decades, engineers have been able to understand and apply electrical principles on the basis of treating electricity as a form of fluid, and quantities such as current remind us of this view. Electronics, however, often forces us to consider in more detail what electric current is as well as what it does. All of the effects that we describe as electrical or electronic depend on units of electrical charge called electrons.

For our purposes we can regard electrons as being particles of unimaginably small size, and all repelling each other. This force of repulsion exists over distances that are large compared to the apparent size of the electron, and we attribute it to a quantity called charge (or electric charge). ...