So, you want to know what is active and passive components, what are the differences between active and passive, and also you want to have some examples to remember.
Well, then welcome.
In this article, we are going to know exactly that. I am not perfect, nor this short article is going to be. This is just my little effort to help you.
I hope you will enjoy it.
What are Active & Passive components?
You know, when we deal with any devices i.e. your phone or laptop. We know for sure it would need electrical power to operate properly. The same is true for electronics components.
So, simply!
Those components which require external power to operate are called active components, while those components which don’t require any external power for their operations are called passive components
This is the simplest definition that I can give you at this time. By external power, I mean a proper voltage or current source.
Most of the time, active components are made of a bunch of devices, i.e. they are integrated into a single device.
Example of Active Devices:
Let’s have a lot on some active devices. An easy way to determine an active element is to just look at it and see if it needs a voltage source to work or turn on.
- Transistors (BJTs)
- Operational Amplifiers
- Integrated Circuits (ICs)
- MOSFETs
- JFETs
- IGBTs
- SCRs
Example of Passive Devices:
To determine if the circuit element is passive, just look at it and try to analyze if it really needs a voltage source to turn on.
- Resistors
- Capacitors
- Inductors
- Switches
- Connecting lines
- Diodes
- Transformers
- Relays
Differences between Active & Passive Components
The biggest difference as I already shared is that – active components require external power for their operations while passive components don’t
Now with that said let’s try to talk about some other advanced differences between active and passive components.
1- Capacity to deliver energy
Active components can deliver power/energy to the circuit or other components, while passive components can’t do it.
As one can clear note that how can passive components deliver power as they don’t have any external power attached to them. Active components can do so because they have access to the external power source, which they can utilize and can deliver to other circuit blocks.
Energy can be in the form of voltages or currents – it depends on situations and requirements of the circuit or system.
2- Donors & Acceptors
Based on the above concept, we can say active components are power donors, while passive components or power acceptors.
Why donors, because they denoted or deliver their power to other elements in the circuits. And passive are called acceptors as they accept power from the active components or sometimes directly from the main power source.
3- Gain
The concept of gain is – a measure of the ability of a two-port circuit to increase the power or amplitude of a signal from the input to the output port by adding energy converted from some power supply to the signal.
As it is required by gain definition to have power supply, then we can say for sure that – active components can provide gain while there is no gain while working with passive components
It is a little advance term – passive components have negative gain, i.e, there is power loss in these elements.
4- Amplification
Amplification means to increase the power of a weak signal. Amplifier are circuits used to achieve such task.
Transistor as amplifier
Amplification is very useful in electronics. Active components have the ability to amplify weak signals, such as transistor. But passive components don’t have any capability of amplification.
5- Current control
Active element can control the current or any signal flow through them. Such as transistor. By changing the base current, we can control the collector current.
While with a passive element, we are not able to control current flow. But we do use them for signal limitation. Such as resistor – we use it to limit the current flow to the circuit.
6- Mathematical operations
Active components, not all of them, are able to do some mathematical operations. For example, operational amplifiers.
While on the other hand, passive components can’t perform any such mathematical operations.
Conclusion
In this article, we try to learn what are active and passive components with some examples. We also try to learn some differences between these two major electronics components.
In the end, we can conclude that components that require external power for their proper operations are called the active components, while components that don’t require any power source are called the passive components.
Examples of active components are transistors, and ICs while examples of passive components are resistors and capacitors.
I hope you enjoyed this short article.
Thank you so much and have grateful life.
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