Circuit boards are strangely beautiful. If you look at a circuit board from a distance, it looks just like San Francisco from an airplane. On a plane, you get a new perspective on the city that you only see from the great heights. You start to see how it is organized and how its foundation is meticulously planned. Roads, buildings, cars, and people all connected in a complete system.
Streets & Roads: The lines running all over the place, connecting to various components are called traces and are just like roads - except instead of cars, electrons are traveling down the roads made out of copper, hurrying off to power one component after another.
Downtown: Downtown is the central hub of human activity – it is where everything happens. You have got hotels, theaters, local business, big corporate offices around Union Square as the heart of San Francisco. It is like those square shapes that you’ll find on a circuit board called Integrated Circuits (ICs). These ICs are where all of the tough work happens. Civic Center is like a CPU (Central Processing Unity) that is carrying out the instructions of a computer program. The public library can be compared to the Rom (Read Only Memory) which stores information that can only be read.
The Avenues: In the Avenues are residential homes, parks, and schools. From a plane, you will notice that the rows of houses in the Avenues often look like the small resistors found all over a circuit board. These resistors are out there resisting the flow of electricity according to their value.Construction: No city is free from construction. Whether it is building a new skyscraper or a new apartment complex, you will find new foundations being laid everywhere in San Francisco. These foundations are just like the empty pads that you will find on a circuit board with no components on it. While they might be empty now, a component will soon be soldered to them.
