What’s the difference between impedance and when a pin on a microchip is floating?
I get the basics of impedance. I’m capacitive impedance it’s a build up of charge. Like air in a balloon. In resistive impedance it’s a build up of the magnetic field, like a flywheel.
A floating pin isn’t connected to anything reference voltage so it can fluctuate with surrounding interference or whatever.
Why do some ICs have tri state, low, high, and high impedance? Isn’t high impedance the same thing as floating?
If it is high impedance that means it had to be connected to something, right? Don’t Some kind of big capacitor or inductor in the chip?
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In resistive impedance it’s a build up of the magnetic field, like a flywheel.
No that’s inductance not resistance. And for the flywheel analogy it’s inertance (inertia) as it’s kinetic energy.
Think of resistance as the portion of impedance that does not have a dependence on frequency, and dissipate energy in the form of heat. Capacitance and inductance together form the portion of impedance that is dependent on frequency. Further, capacitance is storage of potential energy and inductance is of kinetic energy. The charge is in motion in an inductor which created the magnetic field.
Capacitance also acts as a high pass filter (meaning it doesn’t react to / filters out high frequency inputs) and inductance as a low pass filter. There’s analogies to all this in mechanical and fluids as well. Capacitance’s high pass filtering can be thought of like a spring, and inductance like a mass or flywheel or volume of fluid in a pipe.
Floating implies not grounded, but not necessarily open circuit. Being open circuit could be thought of as having very high impedance (specifically resistance). A high enough voltage (force) would be required to cause a flow (current, arc) to close it. Floating implies it is closed circuit but not to a ground which is like a sink where the energy can dump into if no where else to go.
For chips (ICs) they often have high internal impedance so they don’t draw a lot of power through them but can still operate on the signal as intended.
Why do some ICs have tri state, low, high, and high impedance? Isn’t high impedance the same thing as floating?
It means that it will resist being changed by inputs. Yes, like a pin that’s floating relative to the chip.
If it is high impedance that means it had to be connected to something, right? Some kind of big capacitor or inductor in the chip?
No, it’s probably a transistor (active component) that switches to a highly resistive state, leaving the output pin effectively floating - that is, not connected via the chip. Impedance relates to how quickly the charge in that lump responds to voltage (or how quickly matter responds to force in a mechanical system). Not responding is very high, responding quickly is low.
Capacitors and inductors effect impedance, but they aren’t the only things that can do so, and in fact impedance tends to very with which frequency you’re measuring it at, so you can’t really say it has a certain exact value without context.
High - Connected to the high reference voltage.
Low - Connected to the low reference voltage.
High impedance - Not connected.
I thought transistors were just base, collector, and emitter.
How is it switched to be in a high impedance state?
That’s for a BJT or similar. There’s other kinds of transistors, and CMOS digital logic is based on MOSFETs. In MOSFETs, it’s gate, source and drain. If you apply the right voltage (negative for p-type, positive for n-type) to the gate of a MOSFET, the resistance between the source and drain skyrockets. It’s like pinching off a hose. Ideally when fully closed it’s like there’s no connection at all. (And the gate shouldn’t ever conduct - it just controls the channel between source and drain)
This is pretty much the whole principle behind CMOS, by the way. It’s a bunch of hoses pinching each other on and off in such a pattern that it preforms logic. It’s easy to manufacture on a chip for reasons I won’t go into unless you really want.
Thank you, I think I get it. I was only thinking in one type of transistor.
When the resistance goes high, why is that called high impedance, instead of something like high resistance?
And yes, please tell me about cmos manufacture stuff. Just watched a breaking taps video where he’s trying to make his own die 1nm across with lithography. Cool shit, would love to hear any insight you want to share.
When the resistance goes high, why is that called high impedance, instead of something like high resistance?
Disclaimer that I’m not actually an electrical engineer, but I’m pretty sure it’s just convention. Positive charge is also an absence of electrons, just because Ben Franklin guessed wrong, and conventional current goes the opposite direction to the actual current. I probably would have called it “floating”, “disconnected”, “stopped” or “open”, if it was up to me.
As for the manufacturing, making a MOSFET is as easy as taking a wafer of silicon, doping a couple of spots to be opposite to the bulk next to each other, and then oxidising a spot on top of the channel in between to form an insulating SiO2 gate barrier. This is good in terms of steps needed, chemical precision needed, and number of features required per transistor which translates to more transistors per area. CMOS allows an entire chip to be printed in place with barely any more steps, by using both N and P type MOSFETs in complement (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) to ensure that there’s always a path available for current. Then, the only thing left to do is start building up the interconnecting wires over top of the semiconductor with vapour deposition or similar.
There’s a video series where Sam Zeloof makes a MOSFET from scratch in his garage. Skip to the second video if you don’t care about the theory so much. Wikipedia also has a nice illustration of the process of printing CMOS in more detail.
