4 ms·
What part of the computer is emitting the radiation? And how is this program manipulating it to generate a song?
by zenkat 9y ago
What part of the computer is emitting the radiation? And how is this program manipulating it to generate a song?
- godelmachine 9y agoThe CPU colloquially called the processor does this. When you feed a program to the CPU, it switches between logic gates (read - transistors turning on and off), to process the program. As the processing elements switch between power levels of 0 and 1 (0V & 5V / 0V & 12 V), there are electromagnetic fluctuations. These EM fluctuations are the emmissions we are talking about here.
- luk32 9y agoI highly doubt that cpu is the emitter. More probable is some long path on mother board, used for data communication.
- godelmachine 9y agoThe CPU is comprised of millions / billions of transistors which switch on and off multiple times (which depends on the base clock frequency).
- lovelearning 9y agoYes, it's the bus traces between CPU and RAM. From linked paper: "When data is exchanged between the CPU and the RAM, radio waves are emitted from the bus's long parallel circuits."
- ComputerGuru 9y agoI don’t think the FETs generate enough EM on their own? It’s probably the inductors on the motherboard charging and discharging as a result of the FETs that cause the EM whine/hum? Another likely source is the power supply, which has coils by the dozens and will react to varying loads of computational work. The cheap ones are already all over the radio spectrum even when you don’t want them to be.
- godelmachine 9y agoThe transistors also have a drain and a source :)
- mark-r 9y agoThe transistors in a modern machine use a minuscule amount of power and don't have enough area to make an antenna. You need to find a way to affect an output pin of the chip. Address lines for example will do a decent job, and the lower bits of the address are easy to control with a program.
- inetknght 9y agoAny wire acts as an antenna. Therefore, any part of the computer can be the part emitting the radiation. Choosing which part of the computer is a matter of choosing the frequency which dictates the length of wire necessary and which parts can oscillate at that frequency.