ABSTRACT
It is easy to assume, when wrestling with electronic design, that the active devices will cause
most of the trouble. This, like so much in electronics, is subject to Gershwin’s Law: it ain’t
necessarily so. Passive components cannot be assumed to be perfect, and while their short-
comings are rarely discussed, they are all too real. In this chapter I have tried to avoid repeating
basic stuff that can be found in many places, to allow room for information that goes deeper.
Normal metallic conductors, such as copper wire, show perfect linearity for our purposes, and as
far as I am aware, for everybody’s purposes. Ohm’s Law was founded on metallic conductors after
all, not resistors, which did not exist as we know them at that time. Georg Simon Ohm published
a pamphlet in 1827 entitled ‘The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically’ while he was
