Glossary of Terms

IEEE Wireless LAN protocol

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

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.

Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light

Insulating material between 2 charged plates in a capacitor.

Digital Storage Oscilloscope

Electric Double Layer Capacitor

Equivalent Series Resistance

Field Effect Transistor

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

Global System for Mobile communications. A cellular communications protocol

Leakage current.

The Internet of Things

Local Area Network

Current drawn by the supercapacitor

Light Emitting Diode

LIC – lithium-ion capacitor, or lithium-ion hybrid supercapacitor. The anode is a batter-type electrode and the cathode is a supercapacitor type electrode.

Lithium Ion Phosphate battery

Lithium Thionyl Chloride (battery)

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

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

Unit of light power.

Machine to machine

Micro Control Unit or a microprocessor.

Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor

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.

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

Near Field Communications – very short range communication protocol

Personal Digital Assistant

Power Management IC

Inductive (or wireless) charging standard

Drain – Source on resistance of a FET

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

Radio Frequency Identification Device

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.

Solid State Disk drive

Universal Serial Bus

Wide Area Network