- ASIC
-
Acronym ~ Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
A generic term for integrated circuits that have custom designed circuits for specialty applications which are not likely to be produced in large
volumes.
AWK/NAWK
Acronym ~ Aho, Whitesmith, Kernighan who are the original
authors.
-
Acronym ~Nawk=New AWK.
A Scripting language for processing
text files to extract and/or edit information in
them. Largely replaced by the Perl language today.
- CMOS
-
Acronym ~ Complimentary Metal Oxide Silicon.
An integrated circuit
technology which uses p-channel and n-channel field effect
switching transistors. The transistors are formed from metal
paths crossing p- or n-regions with an oxide insulator between
them. - CRC
- Acronym ~ Cyclic
Redundancy Check.
A method for computing a type of "checksum"
that can identify whether data in a message was corrupted during
transmission or reception. - DESIGN
- The two step process of 1) developing a set of design requirements, and
2) searching the design space for implementation possibilities that satisfy the requirements. Design may occur
at multiple levels of abstraction.
- DRAM
- Acronym ~Dynamic
Random Access Memory.
A very common type of semiconductor memory
based on very tiny capacitors that store an electrical charge to
remember a '1'. Each memory cell must be regularly accessed to
restore the charge level to avoid forgetting
anything! - EDA
-
Acronym ~ Electronic Design Automation.
- FAE
-
Acronym ~ Field Application Engineer.
This is a sales and customer support
role title for somebody who does pre- and post-sales support of
complex hardware or software. - FPGA
- Acronym ~ Field
Programmable Gate Array.
A specialty integrated circuit which can
have its logic and circuit topology changed in the field (versus the silicon factory)
via a number
of different electrical programming methods. The
alternative is a standard cell or gate array design which is
manufactured with one circuit topology that cannot be
changed. Devices are not programmed by downloading software
to them. Rather a manufacturer specific data stream is downloaded
into the part to cause specific, hardwired, logic operations to become
interconnected to form the desired logic and memory operations. - HDL
- Acronym ~Hardware
Description Language.
A computer hardware language used to describe the
behavior and structure of electronic systems and circuits using both temporal and
logical constructs. This is in contrast to
computer programming languages which represent behavior by utilizing a fixed
set of instructions executed in a central processing unit such as a microprocessor where time
is (generally) not specifically stated. (See
VHDL and Verilog).
Synthesis software can accept restricted subsets of an HDL to
directly create complex logic circuit implementations. Simulation
tools can elaborate the structures defined in the description and
execute their behaviors to produce a dynamic representation of the
circuit operation as a result of applying stimulus to the circuit inputs. - IMPLEMENTATION
- A process of decision making that results in a selection of
one possibility from the design space that satisfies a given requirement and the specification of that
selection in some arbitrary form.
- MTBF
- Acronym ~ Mean Time Between Failure
- PCI
- Acronym ~ Peripheral
Component Interconnect bus.
A standard used in personal
computers/workstations for high speed communication to Video
controllers, network cards and other high bandwidth
devices. - SCSI
-
Acronym ~ Small Computer Systems Interface.
An ANSI (-1,-2, and -3) standard,
this interface is commonly used to connect high performance
peripherals (disk and tape drives primarily) to a host
computer. - SDRAM
-
Acronym ~ Synchronous DRAM.
Standard DRAM with a synchronous (clocked)
interface which simplifies the access timing. - TCL/TK
-
Acronym ~ Tool Control Language/ToolKit.
A specialty scripting language
used by several EDA tools to provide
programmable control over specific tool actions. Developed by John Ousterhout at Sun
Microsystems. - TTL
-
Acronym ~ Transistor Transistor Logic.
Also refers to a general set of
logic and function block circuits created by Texas
Instruments. The technology itself is considered archaic, however, the interface voltage and current levels
defined by 5-volt TTL logic still persists today.
- Also, in network applications it stands for TIME TO LIVE.
- VERIFICATION
-
An experimentation process by which an implementation specification is compared to the set of design requirements
to identify requirements that are not satisfied by the specification.
- VERILOG HDL
- A competing HDL to VHDL which represents
circuits at a level closer to the physical
hardware.
- VHDL
-
Acronym ~ VHSIC HDL.
Also known as IEEE Standard 1076, VHDL is a
competing HDL to Verilog. - VHSIC
-
Acronym ~ Very High Speed Integrated Circuit
A program sponsored by the United States Defense department
to develop methods for (at the time) high speed electronic devices. - VRAM
-
Acronym ~ Video Random Access Memory.
A special type of DRAM which is
dual-ported to permit simultaneous access to the memory contents for both writing and reading.
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