The Digital Fact Book - Quantel

ARPUAverage Revenue Per Unit – usually used by telecoms companies, to describe the moneymade from each ‘unit’ or ‘customer’!AArtifactParticular visible effects which are a direct result of some technical limitation. Artifactsare generally not described by traditional methods of signal evaluation. For instance,the visual perception of contouring in a picture cannot be described by a signal-to-noiseratio or linearity measurement.ASCIIAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is a standard computer characterset used throughout the industry to represent keyboard characters as digital information.There is an ASCII table containing 127 characters covering all the upper and lower casecharacters and non displayed controls such as carriage return, line feed, etc. Variationsand extensions of the basic code are used in special applications.ASICApplication Specific Integrated Circuit. Custom-designed integrated circuit with functionsspecifically tailored to an application. These replace the many discrete devices that couldotherwise do the job but work up to ten times faster with reduced power consumptionand increased reliability. ASICs are now only viable for very large-scale high volume productsdue to high startup costs and theirinflexibility as otherprogrammable devices, such as FPGAs(field programmable gate arrays), offer more flexible and cheaper opportunities for smallto medium-sized production levels.See also: PLD25