Physical Components of Hardware - Essay Example

Too many physical components of hardware on which a multitude of software can be installed so that the machine as a personal computer can work properly to fulfill the users’ needs. In any case, PC hardware always has a motherboard on which chipsets are present, and also a processing unit known as the CPU, as well as memory parts called RAM.

The RAM
Among the many pieces of hardware in personal computers, the most important part for any PC is the memory part and this includes the RAM, or in other words, the Random access Memory. It is known as random access memory as the user can access any cell of the memory if the rows and columns of the memory are well known to the user (David, Hennessy, and Ashenden, 2004, p. 33).

RAM is the memory chip that has millions of small and minute integrated elector circuits on the chip and these are the circuits that are composed of transistors as well as capacitors. A memory cell is created in the Dynamic RAM by pairing the transistor and the capacitor. The storage unit of the memory cell is in bytes and it has been calculated that the memory cell can store a byte of the data.

During the manufacturing of the RAM, memory cells are attached to the Ram in the form of rows and columns. The rows, in this case, are known as word lines and the columns are known as bit lines. For the working of the Ram, a charge is sent through the column which activates the attached transistor within a period of nanoseconds. Each bit of the memory is held by a flip flop having four to six transistors and it has been seen to be better than the transistors in the sense that these do not need to be refreshed as compared to the Dynamic RAM (Abd-El-Barr, & El-Rewini, 2005, p. 33).

Dynamic RAMS are found to be expensive and slower as compared to the Static RAMS which are faster along with being affordable. RAMs are usually available in the form of modules where the number of chips is multiplied by the capacity of the chip. The customers buy chips based on the module numbers. The greater the capacity the greater the demand for the RAM as the performance of the PC seems to be enhanced with higher storage capacity RAM (Sarkar, 2006, p. 31). Read More