Solid State or Not? — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

In the Solid State Storage lesson, solid state means something specific: electronics made from semiconductor material, with no moving parts. That starts with the transistor and covers everything built from transistors: integrated circuits, microprocessors, RAM, and flash memory such as USB drives, SD cards and SSDs. RAM kept alive by a battery is still solid state; the battery only keeps it powered. Not solid state: anything that works by moving parts (an abacus, Babbage's gear-driven machine, a spinning platter or disc, a winding reel, a relay that clicks open and shut), and the vacuum tube. A tube has no moving parts, but it is not a semiconductor device and has to heat up to work. Sort each card. Five right in a row finishes the round.

What you'll learn

Decide whether a device or component is solid state: built from semiconductors such as transistors, with no moving parts
Recognize that a part with no moving parts is not solid state unless it is a semiconductor device, as with a vacuum tube

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+

1.3 Illustrate the basics of computing and processing.

Key terms

Semiconductor: A material that can be altered to sometimes conduct electricity and sometimes act as an insulator, enabling controllable current flow.
Solid-State Storage: A storage technology that uses semiconductor flash memory chips with no moving parts to store data. Examples include SSDs, NVMe drives, and USB flash drives.
Transistor: A microscopic electronic switch found in microprocessors that represents a binary one (on) or zero (off) using electrical voltage.

Topics

Solid State Semiconductors Storage Media Interactive Streak Sort

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