  RF electronics deals with the generation, acquisition and manipulation of
high-frequency signals. In particle accelerators signals of this kind are
abundant, especially in the RF and beam diagnostics systems. In modern machines
the complexity of the electronics assemblies dedicated to RF manipulation, beam
diagnostics, and feedbacks is continuously increasing, following the demands
for improvement of accelerator performance. However, these systems, and in
particular their front-ends and back-ends, still rely on well-established basic
hardware components and techniques, while down-converted and acquired signals
are digitally processed exploiting the rapidly growing computational capability
offered by the available technology. This lecture reviews the operational
principles of the basic building blocks used for the treatment of
high-frequency signals. Devices such as mixers, phase and amplitude detectors,
modulators, filters, switches, directional couplers, oscillators, amplifiers,
attenuators, and others are described in terms of equivalent circuits,
scattering matrices, transfer functions; typical performance of commercially
available models is presented. Owing to the breadth of the subject, this review
is necessarily synthetic and non-exhaustive. Readers interested in the
architecture of complete systems making use of the described components and
devoted to generation and manipulation of the signals driving RF power plants
and cavities may refer to the CAS lectures on Low-Level RF.
