Dictionary of Electrical Engineering

Commonly used terms in the Electrical industry.

Ohm's Law
a fundamental law which states that the voltage across a resistance is directly proportional to the current flowing through it. The constant of proportionality is known as the resistance.

This concept can be generalized to include the relationship between the voltage and current in all situations, including alternating voltages and currents. In this case, all the quantities are measured as complex numbers, known as phasors, that are functions of frequency. This broadens the basic definition of resistance, which is a real number measured in ohms, to that of impedance, which is a complex number with magnitude measured in ohms and phase angle in degrees. The real part of the complex number representing impedance is the resistance while the imaginary part is the reactance. Ohm's Law is a central concept to most electrical engineering theories.
Ohm
Ohm, Georg Simon (1789-1854) Born: Erlangen, Germany

is best known for his discovery of what we now call Ohm's Law. Ohm held a variety of teaching posts at secondary schools
as well as universities. In 1827 he published his greatest work, Die Galvanische Kette. Along with Andre Ampere, Ohm was the first to publish rigorously mathematical and theoretical work on electricity. Ohm's famous law states that current in a resistor is proportional to the applied voltage and inversely proportional to the resistance. Ohm's work was initially scorned because it lacked the experimental evidence. Worldwide acclaim changed Ohm's fortunes several years later.

He is honored by having his name used as the unit of resistance, the ohm, and the unit of conductivity, the mho.
ohmic contact
a heavily doped and/or low barrier height metal to semiconductor interface or contact that has a very low resistance relative to the remainder of the device, such that the device performance is not significantly degraded. At lower doping levels, the ohmic contact is described by Ohm's Law, while at higher doping levels, tunneling dominates.
ohmic loss
a term used to describe the power dissipated due to the finite conductivity of the metallic structure of an antenna, waveguide, transmission line, etc.
ohmic medium
a medium in which conductivity is independent of the applied field.
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