When I was a student, I read various literatures on electronics and communications design trends, with hopes of becoming more articulate in my profession (and to quench some curiosities). I tried reading some magazines such as "Electronics Design". Darn, it was hard to comprehend back then! I would just skim through pages and try to understand the complex  concepts (except for Bob Pease's section - ED readers will know). About 20 minutes later I would have a magazine of New Scientist/Time/Reader's Digest/National Geographic in my hands. Of course, all that changed when I began taking higher level courses. Suddenly, all those SNR and clocking considerations made sense. Now, as a graduate with a complete arsenal of pertinent know-how under my belt, I rarely have to read an article that has me jumping to Wikipedia every now and then. (Rarely, because some acronyms and terms that just gained popularity in the industry are not part of a fresh graduate's lexical resource.) 

Here, I share some of them which I believe is important:



Hogel- 3D term for a pixel

Trigate transistor- manufactured by Intel, a transistor conducting in 3 dimensions

Ivy bridge- microprocessor composed of trigate transistors, also by Intel

Haitz’s law- LED version of Moore’s law

Energy harvesting- energy harnessed from everyday sources (i.e. vibrations, temperature 
          differences, etc.)

DMAC(Direct Memory Addressing Controller)- can access data without the help of the CPU

Metamaterials- artificially engineered materials, can be used for cloaking by engineering
                            structures to a scale smaller than the wavelength of the source

Graticule- the graph etched on the screen of CRT oscilloscopes

Surface Plasmon Polaritons- are infrared or visible frequency electromagnetic waves trapped at or guided along metal dielectric interfaces

HDMI - High Definition Multimedia Interface. A cable/connector able to carry high definition digital video and digital audio down a single cable. The 'new' scart. 

ARM - Acorn RISC Machine/Advanced RISC Machine

SoC - system-on-chip

Spectral Efficiency - squeeze as much data into the least amount of spectrum possible (bits per second per Hertz)

Minimum Shift Keying - m=0.5 for FSK

LMR - Land Mobile Radio (most popular - P25)

PMR - Private Mobile Radio

MRAM - Magnetoresistive RAM

FRAM - Ferroelectric RAM

PCM - Phase Change Memories

MLC - Multilevel Cell - store more than 1 bit in a transistor

TLC - Triple-level cell - 3 bits of data in 1 transistor

MPEG - Motion Picture Experts Group

AAC- Advanced Audio Coding (successor to mpeg)

HE-AAC - High Efficiency AAC

AAC-LC - AAC Low Complexity

AAC-LD - AAC Low Delay

Bulkhead - most expensive part of a power sensor

Khroneker Delta - discrete form of the dirac delta.

Transistor - stands for Transfer Varistor

Intelsat - International Telecommunications Satellite

Domsat - Domestic Satellite

Ascending Pass - orbital pass from south to north

Descending Pass - orbital pass from north to south

Prograde Orbit - orbit in which satellite moves in the same direction as Earth's rotation, also known as direct orbit

Retrograde Orbit - orbit in which satellite moves in the opposite direction as Earth's rotation

Argument of Perigee - angle from ascending node to perigee, measured along the orbital plane across the earth's center

NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (this should be basic, but I really didn't know the meaning back then, I'm only human)

Phonemes - individual speech sounds

Ampacity - amount of current a conductor can carry

ASIC - Application-Specific Integrated Circuit

AFE - Analog Front End

Diameter - network signalling protocol used by LTE

RADIUS Remote Authentication Dial In User Service - AAA authentication, authorization and accounting protocol used by wi-fi network access

LTCC - low-temperature co-fired ceramic technology

TMA - Tower Mounted Amplifier

ePHEMT - enhancement mode pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor

SEP - standard essential patent

FRAND - fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory

Non-executable Memory - certain pages are marked non-executable to prevent security holes in the Windows OS (effectiveness yet to be proven)

RPC - Remote Procedure Calls

.dll - dynamically linked library

Dyad - tensor of rank two

Haptics - refers to the tactile feedback we get in response to touching a physical object

EMC - electromagnetic compatibility

Segway - world's first self-balancing electronic transportation device

HEMT - high electron mobility transistor

Sentroller - sensors that measure data and are smart enough to take action on what's reported

BRA - basic rate access - single digitized voice channel, basic unit of digital multiplexing

PXI - PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation 

 BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy/Bluetooth Smart