A backbone in a computer network refers to that part of the network infrastructure which carries the majority of traffic on the network at high speeds and connecting various networks with each other. It primarily consists of routers and switches which are connected by fiber optical links. Big companies with offices distributed in different geographical…
What is Transceiver?
A transceiver is a device which has both the transmitter and the receiver combined and they share a common circuitry. A transceiver may differ in scope from application to application. In a LAN, a NIC card may house a transceiver which applies signals onto the wire and also detects the passing signals. In radio communications,…
What is Memory Bus?
The set of wires that carry memory addresses and data to and fro between a memory controller (Northbridge in a PC) and main memory (e.g. RAM) is called Memory Bus. It generally comprises of an Address Bus and a Data Bus and is often called a system bus. These are a part of the PC’s…
What is CMOS?
Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor is a low power based semiconductor technology which is very popular in contemporary digital electronic devices like microprocessors, microcontrollers SRAMs etc. and also analog devices like image sensors and transceivers. A CMOS uses a symmetric pair of n-MOSFETs and p-MOSFETs as one functional entity to construct digital logic circuits. It offers…
What is ULSI?
ULSI stands for Ultra Large Scale Integration which refers to the chips with complexity of more than One million transistors. The term was coined when the critical dimensions of patterns in the chips hovered in the range of 0.25 micrometers, which have now reduced even further to less than 100nm marking a transition from the…
What is Transistor?
A transistor is a semiconductor device used for amplification and switching of electronic signals. It is generally a three terminal device which accepts a small signal on two of its terminals which in turn control a much larger signal on another pair of terminals. The input signal may modulate the output signal in proportion to…
What is Semiconductor?
Semiconductor is that class of materials which have their energy band gap in between conductors and insulators, typically ranging from 0.7 to 3.6 eV. Electrical conductivity varies in the range of 103 to 10-8 seimens per cm. Semiconductor conductivity can be readily modified by introducing impurities into the crystal lattice and this particular feature makes…
What is Processor?
A processor is a high density integrated circuit designed for digital computing purposes. It is the brain of a computing device where processing of data in binary form, number crunching and execution of the instructions takes place. It can be a general purpose processor like the CPUs used in microcomputers or an application specific dedicated…
What is Petaflop?
Petaflops mean a thousand trillion Floating Point Operations per Second. It is an indicator of the theoretical computing power of the processor and measures how many floating point operations can be performed. Floating Point numbers are a way to represent large real numbers within finite precision limits of the computer. It is a performance term…
What is Nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology is the engineering of systems on atomic and molecular levels such that at least one dimension of devices or structures is sized between 1 to 100 nanometers. It involves design, characterization and production of devices by controlled manipulation of size at the nanometer scale to produce at least one superior characteristic. It encompasses various…
What is MOSFET?
Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor is a voltage controlled semiconductor device that operates on the principle of controlled electron flow through a channel by varying the width of channel. The width of the channel is controlled by the voltage applied at the ‘Gate’ terminal which is separated from the channel between the other two…
What is Ivy Bridge?
Ivy Bridge is the codename for Intel’s line of processors based on the 22nm die fabrication technology rumored to release in Q1 of 2012. These are touted as the scaled down version of the 32nm Sandy Bridge Processor architecture offering enhanced graphics through Next Generation HD Graphics and PCI-E 3.0 support, reduced power consumption through…
What is Microcode?
It is the implementation of a hardware CPU with some help from software rather than building the entire CPU as hard wired logic. Hence, these are the hardware level instructions which can directly control the microprocessor. A single machine code may translate into many microcode instructions on the microprocessor level which may map to a…
What is Moore’s Law?
Moore’s Law is an observation made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors per square inch that can be inexpensively placed on an IC would double roughly every two years. The current definition also adds that the data density would double every 18 months and is expected to do so for at…
What is Instruction Set?
An Instruction set is the set of commands that a microprocessor inherently knows how to do. It deals with the programming related part of computer architecture which defines instructions, registers, addressing modes, interrupt and exception handling, native data types etc. which that particular microprocessor understands. It is the instruction set that determines the type of…
What is Instruction Cycle?
The basic operation flow cycle that a computer performs recursively, during which it fetches the opcodes for the instructions from the memory, decodes it, reads the associated memory address, fetches operands and finally executes the instruction is called an Instruction cycle for the computer. The result of the operation may be stored in the main…
What is Flip Flop?
A flip flop is a two state device which can store two stable states which find widespread use as memories for sequential logic operations in the form of register banks. These are clocked edge-triggered devices specially designed for synchronous systems. The change in state of these devices can take place only on a rising/falling edge…
What is FC-PGA?
Flip-Chip Pin Grid Array is a form of PGA IC packaging design popularized by Intel’s Celeron and Pentium line of processors where the chip is located on the side away from the motherboard and is attached to the motherboard using the arrayed pin grids on the bottom of the chip which fit in easily…
What is Dual Core Processor?
A Dual Core processor is a single computing entity which has two independent processors (cores) on a single die which may or may not, share cache memory or implement inter-core communication methods. Each core handles incoming data strings simultaneously in parallel thereby improving efficiency. A dual core, unlike multi-processor systems does not have independent resources…
What is Digital Signal Processor (DSP)?
Processor highly specialized for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing are termed as a DSP. These processors specialize in dealing with signals represented in large chunks of digital data and near real time processing of Signal Modeling tasks like Convolution, Transfer Functions and Frequency Responses and Signal Processing Tasks like Estimations, Filtering etc.…