For the Love of Acronyms, Batman

Informally (which is certainly not to suggest that anything that goes on SemiSerious is formal) I keep a list of acronyms which are used for different things in different fields. With my memory being what it is, very few of these make it out of the dark recesses of my mind and into the light of day. That said, though, there is a danger of the topic turning into a serial item for this blog. (I know. Aren’t we all desperate for content.) Re-use of acronyms can get interesting and confusing when not too distant fields, let’s say two within the semiconductor industry itself, use the same TLA to refer to completely different things.

As I mentioned in a recent post, Semiconductor Insights technology analysts along with our Portelligent and EETimes colleagues have begun the task of selecting the winners for our annual Insight Awards recognizing the most innovative technologies appearing in the last year. A new award category for this year is the Mobile Processor. Without giving too much away regarding who may win the award for Most Innovative Mobile Processor, our analyst discussion turned to the netbook and the emerging category of device known as “MID” or mobile internet device as Wikipedia will inform you.

In fact, the top item returned from Google is this form of MID which takes you directly to the Wikipedia entry. There is actually a site for MID – mid.org, but that’s really not where I was headed with this post (that seemed like a good idea when working late and trying to avoid getting anything productive done.) The late night and what has piqued my interest lately is the history of solid-state imaging. And that’s where the other MID comes in. Image sensor techies who have been around long enough will know what I’m talking about. Long before CMOS image sensors were popular enough to be known as “CIS,” there were references to “MOS Imaging Devices.”

Okay, maybe these two MID’s are too far distant in time if not in technical field, but I think that’s what made it seems worth a blog post (right – it doesn’t take much). On the same day when I had the chance to participate in identifying one point on technology’s cutting edge, I was also digging progressively further back into history. And those two activities both brought me to MID.

Tags: image sensors, MID
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