Glossary & Acronyms

 

802.11
IEEE Wireless LAN protocol

BLE
Bluetooth Low Energy, low power short range communication protocol commonly used by wearable devices to communicate with a smart phone or tablet.

Ceffective, Ceff
Effective capacitance, or the capacitance that you measure for a given pulse width. Due to the frequency response of supercapacitors, you will see the full DC capacitance for pulses of 10s or longer, ~95% of DC capacitance for pulsewidths of 1s, and 10% – 20% for 1ms pulses. Refer to CAP-XX datasheets where this is characterised and explained.

CCFL
Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light

Dielectric
Insulating material between 2 charged plates in a capacitor.

DSO
Digital Storage Oscilloscope

EDLC
Electric Double Layer Capacitor

ESR
Equivalent Series Resistance

FET
Field Effect Transistor

GPRS
General Packet Radio Service, a cellular communications protocol that was an extension of GSM

GSM
Global System for Mobile communications. A cellular communications protocol

IL, I_L
Leakage current.

IoT
The Internet of Things

LAN
Local Area Network

Leakage current
Current drawn by the supercapacitor

LED
Light Emitting Diode

LiFePO4
Lithium Iron Sulphate battery

LiSOCl2
Lithium Thionyl Chloride (battery)

LoRa
Long Range low power communications protocol, suitable for wide area networks up to a few km range.

LTE CAT M1
Long Term Evolution, category M1. A new cellular technology, specifically designed for the needs of applications targeting the IoT or M2M communications.

Lux
Unit of light power.

M2M
Machine to machine

MCU
Micro Control Unit or a microprocessor.

MOSFET
Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor

MPPT
Maximum Peak Power Tracking. Method used by power management ICs to set input power drawn from an energy harvester so the maximum possible power is drawn from the harvester.

NB IoT
Narrow Band Internet of Things. A lower power narrow band (lower bitrate) cellular communications protocol sited for the IoT and M2M communication.

NFC
Near Field Communications – very short range communication protocol

PDA
Personal Digital Assistant

PMIC
Power Management IC

Qi
Inductive (or wireless) charging standard

R_DSON
Drain – Source on resistance of a FET

RMS
RMS current, voltage or power. Root Mean Square (= square root of the mean of the squares).

RFID
Radio Frequency Identification Device

SPICE
Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis. A general-purpose, open-source analogue electronic circuit simulator. It is a program used in integrated circuit and board-level design to check the integrity of circuit designs and to predict circuit behaviour.

SSD
Solid State Disk drive

USB
Universal Serial Bus

WAN
Wide Area Network