Adder (electronics)An adder, or summer, is a digital circuit that performs addition of numbers. In many computers and other kinds of processors adders are used in the arithmetic logic units (ALUs). They are also used in other parts of the processor, where they are used to calculate addresses, table indices, increment and decrement operators and similar operations. Although adders can be constructed for many number representations, such as binary-coded decimal or excess-3, the most common adders operate on binary numbers.
Circuit (computer science)In theoretical computer science, a circuit is a model of computation in which input values proceed through a sequence of gates, each of which computes a function. Circuits of this kind provide a generalization of Boolean circuits and a mathematical model for digital logic circuits. Circuits are defined by the gates they contain and the values the gates can produce. For example, the values in a Boolean circuit are boolean values, and the circuit includes conjunction, disjunction, and negation gates.
Hardware emulationIn integrated circuit design, hardware emulation is the process of imitating the behavior of one or more pieces of hardware (typically a system under design) with another piece of hardware, typically a special purpose emulation system. The emulation model is usually based on a hardware description language (e.g. Verilog) source code, which is compiled into the format used by emulation system. The goal is normally debugging and functional verification of the system being designed.
Amdahl's lawIn computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. It states that "the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used". It is named after computer scientist Gene Amdahl, and was presented at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1967.
Circuit complexityIn theoretical computer science, circuit complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory in which Boolean functions are classified according to the size or depth of the Boolean circuits that compute them. A related notion is the circuit complexity of a recursive language that is decided by a uniform family of circuits (see below). Proving lower bounds on size of Boolean circuits computing explicit Boolean functions is a popular approach to separating complexity classes.
Carry (arithmetic)In elementary arithmetic, a carry is a digit that is transferred from one column of digits to another column of more significant digits. It is part of the standard algorithm to add numbers together by starting with the rightmost digits and working to the left. For example, when 6 and 7 are added to make 13, the "3" is written to the same column and the "1" is carried to the left. When used in subtraction the operation is called a borrow.
Hardware accelerationHardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calculated in software running on a generic CPU can also be calculated in custom-made hardware, or in some mix of both. To perform computing tasks more quickly (or better in some other way), generally one can invest time and money in improving the software, improving the hardware, or both.
Moving-average modelIn time series analysis, the moving-average model (MA model), also known as moving-average process, is a common approach for modeling univariate time series. The moving-average model specifies that the output variable is cross-correlated with a non-identical to itself random-variable. Together with the autoregressive (AR) model, the moving-average model is a special case and key component of the more general ARMA and ARIMA models of time series, which have a more complicated stochastic structure.
Data integrationData integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies need to merge their databases) and scientific (combining research results from different bioinformatics repositories, for example) domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume (that is, big data) and the need to share existing data explodes.
AI acceleratorAn AI accelerator is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and machine vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability.