G

(jigga) abbr. See giga-.

GaAs

(gallium arsenide) abbr. See gallium arsenide.

gain

n. The scaling factor of an amplifier or other circuit or software that transforms a signal. See also offset.

Example: Consider a simple op-amp used as a linear amplifier. Its transfer function will be

output = X input + offset

where X is the gain.

GAL

(rhymes with pal) abbr. See generic array logic.

gallium arsenide

n. A material used instead of silicon for manufacturing some specialized ICs. Abbreviated GaAs. Gallium arsenide is a mixture of two elements, gallium (Ga) and arsenic (As). Gallium is a by-product of the smelting of other metals, notably aluminum and zinc, and it is rarer than gold. Arsenic is not rare, but it is very poisonous.

GaAs ICs offer low noise and good gain even at very high frequencies (tens of GHz). Unfortunately, they re expensive and have only a third of the thermal conductivity of silicon. Chips made from GaAs run hot.

garbage collector

n. Part of a run-time environment that automatically reclaims areas of dynamically allocated memory (on the heap) that are no longer being used by the application. All Java run-time environments include a garbage collector. In C++, which does not have a garbage collector by default, it is possible to add one with a third-party package. If you don t have a garbage collector, though, you need to manually reclaim memory that is no longer being used with the delete keyword.

The big advantage of a garbage collector...