Wires, Cables & Interconnect

Connectors, headers, wires — the plumbing

Wire (solid/stranded, by AWG/mm2)

Wire

A flexible conductor used to connect components in a circuit. Available as solid (single core) or stranded (multiple thin cores) with gauge determining current capacity.

Coaxial / Twisted-pair / Ribbon Cable

Cable

Signal cables with geometry: coax shields one conductor for RF, twisted pair cancels noise differentially (Ethernet, RS-485), ribbon carries many lines to IDC connectors. Impedance matching is what separates them from 'just wire'.

Optical Fiber & Connectors

Cable

Light guided down hair-thin glass by total internal reflection — the backbone of the internet and the Optical Communication unit. Numerical aperture, attenuation in dB/km, and splice loss: the syllabus terms all live in this cable.

PCB / Breadboard / Perfboard

Board

Physical platforms for building circuits. Breadboard is solderless and reusable for prototyping. Perfboard has copper pads for soldering permanent one-off builds. PCB is a custom-manufactured board for production-quality circuits.

Lugs, Ferrules, Heat-shrink, Glands

Hardware

The unglamorous hardware that makes wiring reliable and safe: lugs bolt wires to terminals, ferrules stop stranded wire from splaying in screw clamps, heat-shrink insulates and strain-relieves, glands seal cable entries.