4. Standard Magnitudes

Many of the measured quantites in electronics are very large or very small in terms of the basic units of measurement. For convenience, a standard system of multiple powers-of ten is used along with standard magnitude prefixes and symbols.

It was intended that the symbols for magnitude multipliers greater than unity be upper-case letters and those for magnitude multipliers less than unity be lower-case letters. However, the letter "K" had already been used for decades as the symbol for Kelvin temperature, and so the lower-case "k" is used as multiplier symbol. In digital electronics, particularly in regard to computer circuits, the upper-case "K" is used to mean =1024 rather than "k=1000". The standard multipliers, prefixes and symbols are shown in Table1. Compound prefixes, such as "micro-micro" are discouraged.

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Breadboard	Capacitors
Color Code Rings on Resistors	Standard Electrical Units
Standard Magnitudes	IC-555 Timers
Soldering	Measurements