| 10 Gigabit Ethernet | 10 GE, 10 GbE, or 10 GigE. Transmits Ethernet frames at 10 gigabits per second (10×109 or 10 billion bits per second). Full-duplex only p2p. Copper or fiber |
| 10 G SONET | OC-192 |
| 10 GbE | 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
| 16CH | Sixteen channel |
| 1CH | One channel, or single channel |
| 1U | Rack unit (U or RU), 44.45 mm. Overall height of 19” and 23” rack frames |
| 2.5 G SONET | OC-48 |
| 2CH | Two channel, or dual channel |
| 2U | Twice the height of 1U |
| 3U | 3x the height of 1U |
| 4CH | Four channel, or quad channel |
| 8b/10b | Line code that maps 8-bit words to 10-bit symbols, for DC-balance and bounded disparity, yet allow enough state changes to allow good clock recovery |
| 8CH | Eight channel, or octo channel |
| AdvancedTCA | Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture, or PICMG 3.x for carrier grade equipment, also ruggedized for military and aerospace. blades can be Processors, Switches, AMC carriers, etc. Eg. shelf may contain one or more switch blades and several processor blades |
| AIA | Automated Imaging Association, global machine vision industry trade group |
| AMC | Advanced Mezzanine Card, per |
| API | Application Programming Interface |
| ATCA | AdvancedTCA |
| BERT | Binary Erlang Term. Defines data types, eg int, char, etc. |
| Bi-Directional Single Strand | Single strand, bi-directional 10 Gbit/s optics capable of a single-mode fiber connection functionally equivalent to 10 G BASE-LR or -ER |
| bit rate | Number of bits transferred per operation, aka channel width or word length. |
| BNC | Bayonet Neill-Concelman coax connector |
| Bus | A communications line or channel, conforming to an agreed protocol |
| C-Link | Camera Link High Speed |
| Camera Link | Serial communication protocol using NS Channel-Link for scientific and industrial video including cameras, cables and frame grabbers. Base – MDR, 255 Mbs. Medium – 2nd cable, 510 Mbs. Full 680 Mbs. Deca – +2 cables, 80-bit, 880 Mbs |
| CCD | Charge-coupled Device. Moves charge between capacitive bins, eg convert photons to charge in MOS, then read out via CCD. Used for medical and industrial grade image capture |
| CDR | Clock and Data Recovery |
| CEPT | Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (Europe) |
| CEPT | European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations |
| CL | CameraLink, Camera Link |
| CL HS | Camera Link High Speed |
| CLHS | Camera Link High Speed |
| CLHS M | CLHS at 3.125 Gbps per lane |
| CLHS X | CLHS at 10.3 Gbps per lane |
| CMOS | Complementary Metal-oxide Semiconductors. Used for consumer-grade image capture |
| CoaXPress | Asymmetric high speed serial communication over single coaxial cable without external power or uplink cables. 6.25 Gbps, parallel cables ok |
| Codec | Coder/decoder of a digital data stream |
| CompactPCI (unofficially cPCI, CPCI, cPCIe, or CPCIe) | 32-bit bus. 3U or 6U, interconnect via J1 and J2 on backplane, pins (2 mm spacing) conform to PICMG. 8 boards per segment, can be bridged, hot-pluggable |
| COTS | Commercial Off The Shelf, as opposed to a custom or bespoke design or product |
| CXP | CoaXPress |
| DDR2 | Double Data Rate memory |
| DDR3 | Double Data Rate memory. 2X DDR2 |
| Differential signaling | transmit data as voltage difference between two stands of a pair, compare at receiver. |
| DIMM | Dual In-Line Memory Module, 64-bit |
| DMA | Direct memory Access. Bypass CPU, memory-to-memory, |
| DoE | United States Department of Energy |
| DoS | United States Department of Defense |
| DoS | United States Department of State |
| DRAM | Dynamic Random Access memory. Main memory |
| Duty Cycle | Time it takes for a signal to complete and on-off cycle. D = PW / T |
| DV | PMC DV |
| E3 | 34 Mbps, 512 channels. European E-carrier transmission system. Not compatible, but comparable, with US T-carrier. Carries DS3 data |
| ECL | Emitter-coupled Logic. > 1 Gbps high-speed differential interface technology – high power, high speed. |
| EDT | Engineering Design Team, Inc. Hillsboro WA |
| EHT | Eagle Harbor Technologies, Inc. Seattle WA |
| EMEA | Europe, Middle East, and Africa |
| EMI | Electromagnetic Interference |
| Ethernet | 10-100 Gbps. IEEE 802.3. Twisted pair and fiber optic with hubs and switches, also bridges, repeaters. Frame transmission |
| Fiber Optic | Low attenuation, high bandwidth, insulated, secure (no tapping), cheaper than copper and no theft, no EMF i.e. isolated |
| FMC | FPGA Mezzanine Card |
| FPGA | Field Programmable Gate Array |
| fps | Frames per second |
| Freewheeling diode | To eliminate sudden voltage spike seen across an inductive load when its supply current is suddenly reduced.Also flyback, snubber diode, commutating, suppressor, suppression, clamp, or catch diode |
| GB | Gigabyte, Gb. One thousand million bytes |
| Gb/s | Gigabytes per second |
| Gbps | Gigabits per second |
| Gbs | Gigabytes per second |
| GiB/s | Gibibyte (binary gigabytes) per second. Data rate |
| GigE Vision | Interface standard for high-performance industrial cameras over Ethernet. Overseen by AIA |
| GT/s | Gigatransfers per second. Sample rate, or ops per second transferring data per channel |
| GPGPU | General Processing using Graphic Processing Units |
| HD | High Definition, video standard e.g. 1080p |
| HIPPI | ANSI High-Performance Parallel Interface, includes ECL |
| HPC | High Performance Computing |
| HS | frame grabber |
| I/O | Input/Output |
| IGBT | Insulated-gate bipolar transistor. Fast switch |
| Interwebs | www.zerif.co.uk |
| J1 J2 | 110 pin connectors |
| Jitter | Deviation from true periodicity, relative to the the clock |
| L-Band | 1 to 2 GHz range. GPS, GSM, satellite phones, mobile downlink, aviation, ham radio, military telemetry, radio astronomy (hydrogen line) |
| LAN PHY | 10 GbE LAN variant with line rate 10.3125 Gbps |
| LC | Lucent/Little/Local Connector. For high density SFP/+, XFP etc. |
| LVDS | Low Voltage Differential Signaling. > 1 Gbps high speed, low power. Physical layer in many frame grabbers and optical transceivers |
| Mb/s | Megabits per second |
| Mbs | Megabits per second |
| MBs | Megabits per second |
| MDR26 | Mini D-Ribbon 26-pin |
| Mezzanine | A circuit board that is mounted on a mainboard. It cannot run standalone. It draws power from the mainboard, and exchanges data with the mainboard |
| MHz | Megahertz. Million Hertz |
| MMF | Multi-mode fiber |
| MMF | Multi-mode fiber |
| MOSFET | Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. Fast swicthing at low voltages |
| Mp | Megapixel, million pixels |
| Mpix | Megapixel |
| MSA | Multi-Source Agreement between manufacturers |
| MT/s | Megatransfers per second |
| Mux/Demux | Multiplexer/Demultiplexer |
| NASA | United States National Aeronautics and Space Agency |
| NIC | Network Interface Card |
| NPS | Nanosecond Pulser |
| OC | Optical Channel. Base rate is 51.84 Mbps. Transmission rate is OC-n, where n – base rate. For SONET fiber optic networks |
| OC-1 | Payload 50.112 Mbps |
| OC-12 | 622.08 Mbps, payload 149.76 Mbps, overhead 601.344 Mbps. WAN, web hosts, small ISPs. Aka STM-4 |
| OC-192 | 9953.28 Mbps, payload 9510.912 Mbps. > 1 GbE. Interoperable with 10 GbE Wan PHY. Aka STM-64 and 10 G SONET |
| OC-1920 | 99,532.8 Mbps. Aka STM-640 |
| OC-24 | 1244.16 Mbps, payload 1202.208 Mbps. Rare |
| OC-3 | Payload 155.52 Mbps, overhead 6.912 Mbps. Aka STS-3 (electrical level) and STM-1 (SDH) |
| OC-3c | Concatenated: 3x OC-1. Payload 149.76 Mbps, overhead 6.912 Mbps. CEPT-4 139.264 Mbps |
| OC-48 | 2488.32 Mbps, payload 2405.376 Mbps. > 1 GbE. Regional ISP backbone. Aka STM-16 and 2.5 G SONET |
| OC-768 | 39,813.12 Mbps, payload 38,486.016 Mbps. > 1 GbE. Multi-thousand km terrestrial and submarine cables. Aka STM-256 and 10 G SONET |
| Orphaned rates | OC-9, OC-18, OC-36, OC-96, and OC-1536 |
| OTN | Optical Transport Network. Defines a set of Optical Network Elements (ONE) connected by fiber |
| OTU1 | OTU1 |
| PCI | Peripheral Component Interconnect. 32-bit serial point-to-point bus. |
| PCI | Peripheral Component Interconnect. 32-bit serial point-to-point bus |
| PCI Express (PCIe, PCI-e) | Higher throughput, lower I/O pin count, smaller footprint, better scaling, more detailed error detection and reporting, hot-plugging |
| PCI Express PHY, PCIe PHY, PCIEPHY or just PHY | PCIe Physical Layer |
| PCI-E | PCI Express 8 Lane |
| PCI-X | Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended. 64-bit parallel bus, superseded by PCI Express. Enhances the 32-bit PCI local bus for higher bandwidth for serversand workstations. Higher clock speeds (up to 133 MHz), similar electrical. PCI-X 2.0 533 MHz |
| PCI/104-Express | Incorporates ress withgene,cification defines a 156-pin surface mount connector for the PCI Express signals. |
| PCIe/104 | PCI/104-Express |
| PCIe1g (PCI Express version or generation 1.0) | Line code 8b/10b transfer rate 2.5 GT/s, throughput 250 MB/s per lane |
| PCIe2g (PCI Express version or generation 2.0) | Line code 8b/10b transfer rate 5 GT/s, throughput 500 MB/s per lane |
| PCIe3g (PCI Express version or generation 3.0) | Line code 128b/130b transfer rate 8 GT/s, throughput 984.6 MB/s per lane |
| PCIe4g (PCI Express version or generation 4.0) 2017? | Line code 128b/130b transfer rate 16 GT/s, throughput 1969 MB/s per lane |
| PCIe5g (PCI Express version or generation 5.0) 2019? | Line code 128b/130b transfer rate 32 GT/s, throughput 3938 MB/s per lane |
| PCIe8g | PCI Express 8 Lane |
| PICMG | PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, 227 company consortium formed to adapt PCI to high-performance telecommunications, military, and industrial computing |
| PMC | PCI Mezzanine Card |
| PoCL | Power over Camera Link |
| PoCXP | Power over CoaXpress |
| PoE | Power over Ethernet |
| POS | Packet over SONET/SDH |
| PR | Pulse Repetition Rate or Frequency |
| PW | Pulse Width |
| PWM | Pulse Width Modulation. Encodes data in a pulsing signal. Also PDM, pulse duration modulation |
| PXI | PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation. Modular platform for test equipment, automation systems, and laboratory instruments |
| QSFP | Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable. 4x 1 Gbps |
| QSFP+ | Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable. 4x 10 Gbps |
| QSFP28 | Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable. 4x 28 Gbps, 100 Gbps |
| Realtime | Imperceptible delay, effectively instant, or zero latency |
| RS422 | Differential 10 Mbps, 1,250 m. p2p, no multidrop |
| SBIR | Small business Innovation Grant |
| SC | Optical connector: square connector, subscriber connector, set and click, stab and click. High packing density |
| SDK | Sixteen channel |
| SDR26 | Connector |
| SDR26 | Shrunk MDR |
| SDRAM | Synchronous dynamic random-access memory |
| SFP | Small Form Factor transceiver. Compact, hot-pluggable, for telecom and datacom. Modular interface to a network device (switch, router, media converter, network interface card, etc) to adapt to fiber or copper networking standards. Supports SONET, GbE, Fibre Channel, etc. |
| SFP+ | Enhanced SFP to 16 Gbit/s. Supports 8 Gbit/s, Fibre Channel,10 GbE, standard OTU2, etc. |
| SMF | Single-mode fiber |
| SMF | Single-mode fiber. > 1000 meters |
| SO-DIMM | SODIMM |
| SODIMM | Small Outline Dual In-Line Memory Module |
| SONET | Synchronous Optical Networking (mostly used in US and Canada. Analogous with SDH, mostly used in rest of world). transfer multiple digital bit streams synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). At low transmission rates data can also be transferred via an electrical interface. For real-time, uncompressed, circuit-switched voice encoded in PCM format. Better synchronized via atomic clock than PDH. Transports ATM frames (cells) |
| SRAM | Static Random Access Memory. Fast but expensive, CPU cache |
| ST | Optical connector: straight tip, set and twist, stab and twist, and single twist, square top. Bayonet tab must align, spring loaded |
| STM | Synchronous Transport Module. Basic unit of SDH framing. Level 1 STM-1 is 155.520 Mbps (SONET STS-3c), increases in multiples of 4 |
| STM-1 | OC-3c |
| STM-16 | OC-48 |
| STM-256 | OC-768 |
| STM-4 | OC-12 |
| STM-64 | OC-192 |
| STM-640 | OC-1920 |
| STTR | ?? technolgy Transfer ?? |
| SWAP | Size, Weight, And Power |
| Synchronous serial | Single clock, multiple peripherals |
| T3 | 45 Mbps, 672 channels. North American T-carrier transmission system. Not compatible, but comparable, with European E-carrier. Carries ES3/SL3 data |
| Tflops | Teraflops, one trillion (long scale) floating point operations per second, 1012 Flops |
| TTL | Transistor-to-Transistor Logic, ??? |
| Turnkey | Off the shelf, ready to use. As opposed to a custom design or build |
| UART | Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. Configurable format and speed, external driver circuit |
| USART | Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter |
| VCXO | Volt controlled crystal oscillators |
| VMEbus | Versa Module Europa bus. Eurocard |
| VXS | VMEBus Switched Serial. Improves performance of parallel bus |
| WAN PHY | 10 GbE WAN variant with line rate of ? Gbps (same as OC-192 and STM-64) |
| WDM | Wavelength-division Multiplexing. Example: submarine cabling |
| x1 | PCI single lane – two differential signaling pairs |
| x12 | PCI 12 lane |
| x16 | PCI 16 lane (practical max) |
| x32 | PCI 32 lane (rare) |
| x4 | PCI 4 lane |
| x8 | PCI 8 lane |
| XMC | Switched PCI Mezzanine Card. VITA 42, fifth connector at P15 |
