Welcome to the electronics glossary in our library!

The following glossary entries were abstracted from the book, Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics), with the kind permission of LLH Technology Publishing, Eagle Rock, VA, USA                          ( to return to the main glossary.)

A surface mount process in which a substrate carrying components attached by solder paste is lowered into the vapor-cloud of a tank containing boiling hydrocarbons. This melts the solder paste thereby forming good electrical connections. However, vapor-phase soldering is becoming increasingly less popular due to environmental concerns.

Refers to either hardware or software that exist only in the minds of the people who are trying to sell them to you.

A notation used in logic simulation and synthesis in which a single name is used to reference a group of signals, and individual signals within the group are referenced by means of an index; for example, a[3:0] = a[3], a[2], a[1], and a[0].

Refers to the number of logic gates in a device. By one convention, very-large-scale integration represents a device containing 1,000 to 999,999 gates.

A hole filled or lined with a conducting material which is used to link two or more conducting layers in a substrate.

An extension of dynamically configurable hardware based on a new generation of FPGAs which were introduced around the beginning of 1994. In addition to supporting the dynamic reconfiguration of selected portions of the internal logic, these devices also feature: no disruption to the device's inputs and outputs; no disruption to the system-level clocking; the continued operation of any portions of the device that are not undergoing reconfiguration; and no disruption to the contents of internal registers during reconfiguration, even in the area being reconfigured (see also Configurable Hardware, Reconfigurable Hardware, Remotely Reconfigurable Hardware, and Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware).

A trick used by a computer's operating system to pretend that it has access to more memory than is actually available. For example, a program running on the computer may require ten mega-bytes to store its data, but the computer may have only five mega-bytes of memory available. To get around this problem, whenever the program attempts to access a memory location that does not physically exist, the operating system performs a slight-of-hand and exchanges some of the contents in the memory with data on the hard disk.

Refers to the number of logic gates in a device. By one convention, very-large-scale integration represents a device containing 1,000 to 999,999 gates.

Refers to a memory device which loses any data it contains when power is removed from the system; for example, random-access memory in the form of SRAM or DRAM.

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