From the course: Electronics Foundations: Basic Circuits

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Decibels

Decibels

From the course: Electronics Foundations: Basic Circuits

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Decibels

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- [Tutor] To describe certain characteristics of electronic circuits, we often use the ratio of two values, such as the voltage gain of a filter, which is the ratio of the filters output amplitude over the input signal amplitude. When working with electronics, it's common to encounter ratios for characteristics like gain that are really, really large, going up into the millions or really, really small. To make working with these large or small ratios easier, engineers frequently use a unit called decibels or dB for short. The decibel is a logarithmic unit that's used to express the ratio of two values. You'll usually see decibels used in electronics when describing or comparing quantities of power or amplitude. Such as the gain of filters and amplifier circuits. We can convert quantities of electrical power into decibels using the equation 10 X log base 10 of the ratio between two power values. In this ratio, the power…

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