PowerVRPowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, associated and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL acceleration. PowerVR also develops AI accelerators called Neural Network Accelerator (NNA). The PowerVR product line was originally introduced to compete in the desktop PC market for 3D hardware accelerators with a product with a better price–performance ratio than existing products like those from 3dfx Interactive.
Apollo command and service moduleThe Apollo command and service module (CSM) was one of two principal components of the United States Apollo spacecraft, used for the Apollo program, which landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The CSM functioned as a mother ship, which carried a crew of three astronauts and the second Apollo spacecraft, the Apollo Lunar Module, to lunar orbit, and brought the astronauts back to Earth.
GlobalFoundriesGlobalFoundries Inc. (GF) is a multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company incorporated in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Malta, New York. Created by the divestiture of the manufacturing arm of AMD, the company was privately owned by Mubadala Investment Company, the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, until an initial public offering (IPO) in October 2021. The company manufactures integrated circuits on wafers designed for markets such as mobility, automotive, computing and wired connectivity, consumer internet of things (IoT) and other industrial applications.
IPhone 4sThe iPhone 4s is a smartphone that was designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is the fifth generation of the iPhone, succeeding the iPhone 4 and preceding the iPhone 5. It was announced on October 4, 2011, at Apple's Cupertino campus, and was the final Apple product announced in the lifetime of former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, who died the following day. Orders could be placed on October 7, 2011, and mainstream availability in retail stores began on October 14, 2011 in the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan.
Northbridge (computing)In computing, a northbridge (also host bridge, or memory controller hub) is one of two chips comprising the core logic chipset architecture on a PC motherboard. A northbridge is connected directly to a CPU via the front-side bus (FSB) to handle high-performance tasks, and is usually used in conjunction with a slower southbridge to manage communication between the CPU and other parts of the motherboard.
Edholm's lawEdholm's law, proposed by and named after Phil Edholm, refers to the observation that the three categories of telecommunication, namely wireless (mobile), nomadic (wireless without mobility) and wired networks (fixed), are in lockstep and gradually converging. Edholm's law also holds that data rates for these telecommunications categories increase on similar exponential curves, with the slower rates trailing the faster ones by a predictable time lag.
Processor designProcessor design is a subfield of computer science and computer engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware. The design process involves choosing an instruction set and a certain execution paradigm (e.g. VLIW or RISC) and results in a microarchitecture, which might be described in e.g. VHDL or Verilog. For microprocessor design, this description is then manufactured employing some of the various semiconductor device fabrication processes, resulting in a die which is bonded onto a chip carrier.
Physical layerIn the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking, the physical layer or layer 1 is the first and lowest layer: the layer most closely associated with the physical connection between devices. The physical layer provides an electrical, mechanical, and procedural interface to the transmission medium. The shapes and properties of the electrical connectors, the frequencies to broadcast on, the line code to use and similar low-level parameters, are specified by the physical layer.
Field-programmable gate arrayA field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured after manufacturing. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, but this is increasingly rare due to the advent of electronic design automation tools. FPGAs contain an array of programmable logic blocks, and a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects allowing blocks to be wired together.
Lab-on-a-chipA lab-on-a-chip (LOC) is a device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit (commonly called a "chip") of only millimeters to a few square centimeters to achieve automation and high-throughput screening. LOCs can handle extremely small fluid volumes down to less than pico-liters. Lab-on-a-chip devices are a subset of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices and sometimes called "micro total analysis systems" (μTAS). LOCs may use microfluidics, the physics, manipulation and study of minute amounts of fluids.
