CHAPTER 2 Passive Components Electronic components are the building blocks of an electronic circuit, and all electronic circuits are created by joining components together. At one time this was done by soldering wires between the terminals of components, but nowadays the connections are more likely to be made using metal tracks on an insulating board (a printed circuit board or PCB). On a PCB holes are drilled into the metal tracks, so that components located on the insulated side can be attached and connected by pushing their connecting wires through the holes so that the wires can be soldered to the metal track. We will come back to that in Chapter 5. Often now both the connections and the components are all contained in a single piece of silicon, the integrated circuit (IC), which we shall look at in Chapter 3. In such a circuit, both steady and alternating voltages will exist together, and several types of components do not behave in the same way to alternating voltages as they do to steady voltages. In addition, components can be active or passive. Active components are used to copy (amplify) waveforms and to switch voltages and currents on and off under electrical control.