GLOSSARY

FIB
A Focused Ion Beam system can repair and somewhat “edit” circuits already etched into a semiconductor chip. Generally, the physical circuits on chips cannot be changed at all once they are fabricated. If there is an error in the circuit design then the entire wafer, lot, and production run has the error and is worthless except for verifying circuits on the rest of the chip. This is extremely wasteful of time and money and can occur late in the chip
development stages or just after an alteration is made to the circuits to enhance a feature. Sometimes individual chips have a flaw due to a contaminant in the manufacturing materials.

FIB machines can deposit and remove insulating and conductor material in a very precise fashion, to recover otherwise-wasted chips. FIB machines are expensive and rather slow to repair a chip, but can be very valuable in saving expensive mask layers and weeks of turnaround-time to run a new set of masks through the fab; all while engineers sit pensively wondering if the part of the chip that can’t be tested will perform as expected.

HVAC
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning systems

iASIC 
Iconoclastic ASICs. These devices challenge conventional Analog IC Design Methodology. While others cobble together imperfect cell based designs, JVD’s full custom approach creates the smallest chips that guarantee you the lowest total cost solution

I/O
Input and Output, or I/O, are the signals that interface the real-world to a computer-based electronic system. Inputs can come from switches, keyboards, sensors, and microphones and outputs can drive LEDs, buzzers, speakers, and actuators. I2C, IIC, I2C Inter-Integrated Circuit serial Communications bus standard. Spoken as “eye-squared-sea” See: SPI, SCI, IC

I2S, IIS, I2S
Inter-Integrated-circuit Sound; a serial bus definition for communicating audio between chips. Spoken as “eye-squared-ess”

IC
Integrated Circuit. Originally, electronic circuits were built using discreet components: transistors, resistors, and capacitors that could be seen separately on a board. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments is credited with being the first to successfully integrate a number of circuits onto a single semiconductor substrate. This integrated circuit has all the good characteristics of a semiconductor — consistent mass production, low cost, low power, and long life. Almost the only real negative quality of an IC is its lack of flexibility – it is impossible to change its function once it is produced. But ICs were designed to serve the greatest number of applications, so the first digital ICs formed the most basic gate functions, and later flip-flops, soon adders and shift registers, and ultimately enough transistors were available to design the exotic graphics processors of today on single pieces of silicon.

LNA
Low Noise Amplifier

MEMS
Micro-ElectroMechanical System

MPW
The Multi-Project Wafer has become practical as high-density process technology met 300mm wafers. While most semiconductor manufacturing replicates the pattern for just one chip across the entire silicon wafer, in fact a set of wafers, MPW allows patterns for a number of chips onto a single wafer. Sharing a wafer this way reduces the quantity of die of any one chip pattern that are produced so test chips and low quantity runs are not overwhelmed with potentially un-sellable chips. Realize that a 300mm (approx 12″ diameter) wafer might produce 2,500 die that are 5mm on a side.

NRE
A Non-Recurring Engineering charge is a fee charged to cover substantial up-front costs associated with starting a project with a vendor. NRE may cover equipment, labor, mask charges, or other one-off expenses, and are agreed upon ahead of time. NRE is in contrast to piece-prices that primarily cover the manufacturing costs of individual parts. See: OTP

OBD
On-Board Diagnostics in an automobile provide a port where a technician can interrogate the on-board computer (often the engine control unit) for either stored codes or real-time data that can be interpreted to determine the health of various systems within the vehicle, from engine and drive train to sensors and networks. A persistent fault will often set the “check engine” indicator on the vehicle dashboard. Reading the OBD codes with various instruments can narrow down problems quite readily, with simple handheld instruments getting gross codes that might only indicate the fuel-air mixture is rich while very sophisticated equipment only available (or cost-effective) to dealers or high-end repair shops might be able to point to the specific component that is flawed. All new cars sold in the USA starting with model year 1996 had to provide the OBD-II (second standard version).
Europe started requiring a similar OBD for 2001 cars.

package
The packaging surrounding a semiconductor die protects the delicate circuitry inside from physical contact and damage while letting electrical connections to reach the die. The familiar black flat rectangular objects seen on a circuit board (see image at PCB) are the packaged electronic circuits (the black typical of the hard plastic molding). There are numerous package types for chips, each with attractive characteristics such as size, height, flexibility, lead (pin) spacing & density, heat dissipation (heat spreaders help in some packages), solderability, and, of course, cost.

Earlier packages were “through-hole” packages with pins that passed through the circuit board for mounting against a shoulder and soldered for electrical connection. Modern packages are more likely to be “surface-mount” where leads (notice the change in term) are soldered to traces on the top surface of the board, requiring slightly less space. The spacing of leads/pins on a package is called the pitch (measured center-to-center). Many packaged devices are shipped in bulk to customers using specially designed, static-free tubes, trays, and for high-speed placement tape-and-reel.

Two standards organizations are often associated with packaging: Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) and the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ). Common packaging types include: Dual In-line Package (DIP), Ceramic DIP (CDIP or CerDIP), Thin Small-Outline Package (TSOP), Pin Grid Array (PGA), Ball Grid Array (BGA), Plastic Leadless Chip Carrier (PLCC), Plastic Quad Flat Pack (PQFP), Low-profile Quad Flat Pack (LQFP), Thin Quad Flat Pack (TQFP), Quad Flat Non-lead (QFN), Small Outline Integrated Circuit (SOIC), Small Outline Transistor (SOT), (with Ceramic (C) versions being available for many of the listed Plastic (P) types).

Not all semiconductors are shipped in proper packages but are shipped in “lead frames” or “carriers” which require delicate handling. Some are shipped simply as “bare die”, typically to be soldered directly to a circuit board or module by the customer. Some terms for these technologies include: Chip on Board (COB), Chip Scale Package (CSP), Direct Chip Attach (DCA), and flip chip.

Packages are marked with identifiers such as vendor logos, part numbers, date codes, mask set, country-of-origin/assembly, and advertising (usually IP content), though identification can be obscured through codes when desired. Most full part order numbers include indications of the package type, clock frequency (speed) (for clocked digital circuits), and operating temperature range. The package type code in the order number is rarely the same as the acronyms given here (there is some commonality but can vary by vendor.) See: BGA, back end

real estate
Because of some similarities to Earth-bound land, the term “real estate” is often used in association with semiconductor chips, even to the extent of referring to “nano-acres of silicon” (this makes engineers chuckle). Note the remarks under “die”. Some concepts that are similar:

• Cost increases fairly linearly with area (square feet or square millimeters)

• Starting with the base silicon wafer, layers of material are built above, much like constructing a building on land, although each layer may be built very differently.

• The same way allowance must be made for hallways and elevators to let people go quickly from one room or floor to another, traces, buses, and vias
must be accommodated on chips to let electrical signals go from one part of the circuit to another, consuming valuable die area and requiring effective
routing.

RFID
Radio Frequency IDentification

semiconductor
Semiconductors are materials based on chemical elements that are neither good electrical conductors (like gold and silver) nor good electrical insulators. Instead, under particular conditions, semiconductors can be quickly changed from conductors to insulators, controlling and even amplifying properties of electricity. Silicon (Si) is by far the most useful basis of semiconductors, although in the early days Germanium (Ge) was used (both elements from group 14 of the periodic table of the elements), although some very high-speed circuits today use a molecular combination of gallium (Ga) and arsenic (As) called gallium arsenide, annotated GaAs and spoken in conversation simply as “gas”. See: IC, SiGe

SoC
A System-on-a-Chip is an easy concept and seemingly self-explanatory, but in reality is difficult to pin down indisputably. The SoC is the most-highly integrated circuit today, typically with a variety of functions blended together on a single piece of silicon. The chip should be comprised of all of the major functions required to operate the system, including the digital processor. The entire semiconductor memory system is not expected to be on the SoC, mostly because it could be huge – four or five chips in itself. An SoC should contain at least a quarter million transistors.

The difficulty with defining an SoC is pinning it down. Is a processor required or can the chip simply contain 250,000 gates of logic? What if a massive function is implemented but it takes four similar-sized SoCs to build the entire system? Does it matter if the SoC requires a few support chips like A-to-D converters or PHYs? What if the system is relatively small – something that a microcontroller can operate, like an automobile climate control? Isn’t a microcontroller the original SoC? Is a highly-integrated embedded processor or 32-bit microcontroller an SoC? Do all ASICs and ASSPs fit the classification of SoC? Is a classification of SoC mutually exclusive of MPUs, ASICs, and ASSPs, or an independent label?

Does it matter? Generally some of these issues are simply areas for discussion, but when companies and marketers declare “the market for SoCs is $150B,” then it is important to understand what is included in the category.

When spoken, the letters are spelled out, with the plural form adding an “s” to the end, thus spoken as: ess-oh-seas’. However, the plural of the spelled-out written term is “systems on chip”. See: IC

solid state
Transistor-based electronics and the integrated circuits that are made from them are considered to be solid state, which really means they are more hardy than the former vacuum tube-based circuits and amplifiers that came before. Tubes (the British use the word “valve”) are delicate, take up to a minute to warm up, and may burn out after a few years, while transistors and ICs can take vibration and physical abuse and are essentially instant-on and last forever. Solid state semiconductors have completely taken over from tube-based electronics, the transition starting in the 1950′s

Two exceptions may be some broadcast radio towers that require power output beyond what power transistors can handle, and the finest audio gear from which the “golden ears” of certain well-trained humans can distinguish the odd harmonics perpetuated through tubes for a smoother sound than the even harmonics of digital electronics grind out. Even the last remaining widespread use of vacuum tubes – the CRT (cathode-ray tube) – is quickly falling from favor as LCD screens, LED displays, and other flat or flexible screen technologies replace CRTs for computer monitors and television screens.

The vision of those older TV tubes dying out as power was turned off and the deflection electromagnets and voltage faded, or warbling as the vertical sync or horizontal hold was de-stabilized by aging components or low-flying aircraft, is a vision that is fading into memory (human, not solid state memory).See: semiconductor

T’s & C’s 
The Terms and Conditions are the “fine print” or the long string of what happens after a stated situation develops. Most sales contracts or other contracts have T’s & C’s, often printed on the back of the paper forms or in the long strings of text found in Web link with the tiny little check box next to it. Do not read or ignor the T’s & C’s at your peril. One or another of them have a way of becoming very significant in some future situation you come
across, at which point you will start to see why that particular statement was in the paperwork.