Page 388 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

358 Glossary

Assembly language Human-readable text mnemonics for the machine lan-
guage instructions of a computer architecture. Unlike high-level programming
languages, most assembly language instructions correspond to a single machine
language instruction.

Associativity The number of locations where a single memory address may
be stored in a cache memory.
ATA Advanced technology attachment.
ATE Automatic test equipment.
Atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) Deposition of
material through the chemical reaction of gases at full atmospheric pressure.
Full pressure allows high deposition rates but make it more difficult to create
uniform high-quality layers.
ATPG Automatic test pattern generation.
ATX Advanced technology extended.
Automatic test equipment (ATE) Machines designed specifically to test inte-
grated circuits by providing electrical stimulus and monitoring the response.
Automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) The generation by software of the
minimal set of test vectors required to fully test a given circuit typically through
the use of scan sequentials.
Balanced technology extended (BTX) A form factor specifying the physical
size and power connectors of a motherboard. The BTX standard is designed to
allow easier cooling of components than the older ATX standard.

Ball grid array (BGA) An integrated circuit package using multiple rows of
solder balls on all four sides as leads. Common for chips to be used in portable
applications.
Basic input output system (BIOS) Low-level routines programmed into a
ROM chip on a PC motherboard. The BIOS initializes the PC upon start-up and
provides subroutines that allow applications and the OS to interact with the
motherboard hardware without knowledge of the details of its design.
BBUL Bumpless build-up layer.

BCD Binary coded decimal.
BESOI Bonded etched back silicon on insulator.
BGA Ball grid array.
Big endian A memory addressing format that assumes for numbers more
than 1 byte in size, the lowest memory address is the most significant byte (the
big end) of the number. See little endian.
BIM Binary intensity mask.
Binary coded decimal (BCD) A binary encoding scheme that represents each
digit of a decimal number using four binary digits. This requires more bits than