Microcode ... Modern microcode is normally written by an engineer during the processor design phase and stored in a ROM (read-only memory) or PLA (programmable logic array) structure, or a combination of both. However, machines also exist which have some (or all) microcode stored in SRAM or flash memory...
Electronic Packaging ... It refers to enclosures and protective features built into the product itself, and not to shipping containers. It applies both to end products and to components...
Pentium FDIV Bug ... The flaw was independently discovered and publicly disclosed in October 1994 by Professor Thomas R. Nicely at Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA...
Pulp Mill ... Wood and other plant materials used to make pulp contain three main components (apart from water): cellulose fibres (desired for papermaking), lignin (a three-dimensional polymer that binds the cellulose fibres together) and hemicelluloses, (shorter branched carbohydrate polymers). The aim of pulping is to break down the bulk structure of the fibre source, be it chips, stems or other plant parts, into the constituent fibres...
Microprocessor ... The advent of low-cost computers on integrated circuits has transformed modern society. General-purpose microprocessors in personal computers are used for computation, text editing, multimedia display, and communication over the Internet...
Intel 4004 ... This resulted in the 4004, which was part of a family of chips, including ROM, DRAM and serial to parallel shift register chips...
Calculator ... The first solid state electronic calculator was created in the 1960s, building on the history of tools such as the abacus, developed around 2000 BC; and the mechanical calculator, developed in the 17th century. It was developed in parallel with the analog computers of the day...
Intel ... Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business...
Electronic Circuit ... Breadboards, perfboards or stripboards are common for testing new designs. They allow the designer to make quick changes to the circuit during development...
History Of Computing Hardware ... Computing hardware evolved from machines that needed separate manual action to perform each arithmetic operation, to punched card machines, and then to stored-program computers. The history of stored-program computers relates first to computer architecture, that is, the organization of the units to perform input and output, to store data and to operate as an integrated mechanism (see block diagram to the right)...
History Of General Purpose CPUs ... The design freedom of the time was very important, for designers were very constrained by the cost of electronics, yet just beginning to explore how a computer could best be organized. Some of the basic features introduced during this period included index registers (on the Ferranti Mark 1), a return-address saving instruction (UNIVAC I), immediate operands (IBM 704), and the detection of invalid operations (IBM 650)...
Integrated Circuit ... Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other digital appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the low cost of production of integrated circuits...
Supercomputer ... Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths: in one approach, e.g. in grid computing the processing power of a large number of computers in distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available...
Radio-frequency Identification ... RFID tags are used in many industries. An RFID attached to an automobile during production can be used to track its progress through the assembly line...
Symmetric Multiprocessing ... Serious programming challenges remain with this kind of architecture because it requires two distinct modes of programming, one for the CPUs themselves and one for the interconnect between the CPUs. A single programming language would have to be able to not only partition the workload, but also comprehend the memory locality, which is severe in a mesh-based architecture...
Hubble Space Telescope ... Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. Hubble's Ultra-Deep Field image, for instance, is the most detailed visible-light image ever made of the universe's most distant objects...
Microarchitecture ... The microarchitecture of a machine is usually represented as (more or less detailed) diagrams that describe the interconnections of the various microarchitectural elements of the machine, which may be everything from single gates and registers, to complete arithmetic logic units (ALU) and even larger elements. These diagrams generally separate the datapath (where data is placed) and the control path (which can be said to steer the data)...
Multi-core Processor ... Processors were originally developed with only one core. A many-core processor is a multi-core processor in which the number of cores is large enough that traditional multi-processor techniques are no longer efficient — largely because of issues with congestion in supplying instructions and data to the many processors...
Electronic Design Automation ... This article describes EDA specifically with respect to integrated circuits. History Early days Before EDA, integrated circuits were designed by hand, and manually laid out...
Integrated Circuit Layout Design Protection ... Like most of the other forms of intellectual property, IC layout designs are creations of the human mind. They are usually the result of an enormous investment, both in terms of the time of highly qualified experts, and financially...
Supercomputer Architecture ... While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm. Supercomputers of the 21st century can use over 100,000 processors (some being graphic units) connected by fast connections...
Further Reading: Software
Cryptography ... Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The originator of an encrypted message shared the decoding technique needed to recover the original information only with intended recipients, thereby precluding unwanted persons to do the same...
Electronics ... Electronics is distinct from electrical and electro-mechanical science and technology, which deals with the generation, distribution, switching, storage and conversion of electrical energy to and from other energy forms using wires, motors, generators, batteries, switches, relays, transformers, resistors and other passive components. This distinction started around 1906 with the invention by Lee De Forest of the triode, which made electrical amplification of weak radio signals and audio signals possible with a non-mechanical device...
Information Technology ... A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as management and administration of entire systems...
Website ... A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors...
Linux ... The development of Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration: the underlying source code may be used, modified, and distributed—commercially or non-commercially—by anyone under licenses such as the GNU General Public License... Linux distributions include the Linux kernel, supporting utilities and libraries and usually a large amount of application software to fulfill the distribution's intended use...
Blog ... The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.) Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites...
IBM ... The company was founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation through a merger of three companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Corporation. CTR adopted the name International Business Machines in 1924, using a name previously designated to CTR's subsidiary in Canada and later South America...
Film ... It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects. The process of filmmaking has developed into an art form and industry. Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them...
Supercomputer Operating Systems ... Given that modern massively parallel supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes, they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g. using a small and efficient lightweight kernel such as CNK or CNL on compute nodes, but a larger system such as a Linux-derivative on server and I/O nodes...
Web Service ... The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network"...
Grid Computing ... Grid size can vary by a considerable amount. Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a “super virtual computer” is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks...
Engineering ... The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET) has defined "engineering" as: The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.. ...
Database ... A general-purpose DBMS is typically a complex software system that meets many usage requirements, and the databases that it maintains are often large and complex...
Software Quality ... Historically, the structure, classification and terminology of attributes and metrics applicable to software quality management have been derived or extracted from the ISO 9126-3 and the subsequent ISO 25000:2005 quality model, also known as SQuaRE... Based on these models, the software structural quality characteristics have been clearly defined by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), an independent organization founded by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Object Management Group (OMG)... CISQ has defined 5 major desirable characteristics needed for a piece of software to provide business value: Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Maintainability and (adequate) Size...
Artificial Intelligence ... The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence—the sapience of Homo sapiens—can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine. This raises philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings, issues which have been addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity...
Google ... Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024...
Molecular Nanotechnology ... A roadmap for the development of MNT is an objective of a broadly based technology project led by Battelle (the manager of several U. S. National Laboratories) and the Foresight Institute...
Business Intelligence ... BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics...
Search Engine Technology ... Most mixed search engines are large Web search engines (example: Google) or enterprise search software products (example: Autonomy)...
Email ... An email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses...
Electronic Commerce ... 1987: Swreg begins to provide software and shareware authors means to sell their products online through an electronic Merchant account... Business applications Some common applications related to electronic commerce are the following: Document automation in supply chain and logistics Domestic and international payment systems Enterprise content management Group buying Automated online assistants Instant messaging Newsgroups Online shopping and order tracking Online banking Online office suites Shopping cart software Teleconferencing Electronic tickets Governmental regulation In the United States, some electronic commerce activities are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)...
Linux Adoption ... Microsoft denied having paid a Nigerian contractor $400,000 to replace Linux on school computers with its own software... The court case was brought by Savoir Faire Linux, a small Montreal-based company that had hoped to bid Linux software to replace the government's aging Windows XP... The judge dismissed the government's contention that Microsoft software was chosen because employees were already familiar with Windows and that switching to a different operating system would have cost more...
Robotics ... The concept and creation of machines that could operate autonomously dates back to classical times, but research into the functionality and potential uses of robots did not grow substantially until the 20th century. Today, robotics is a rapidly growing field, as we continue to research, design, and build new robots that serve various practical purposes, whether domestically, commercially, or militarily...
Graphics ... Graphics can be functional or artistic. The latter can be a recorded version, such as a photograph, or an interpretation by a scientist to highlight essential features, or an artist, in which case the distinction with imaginary graphics may become blurred...