In
engineering, some methods or components make special demands on the system. The extra design features necessary to meet these demands are called overhead. For instance, in
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
, a particular
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
might draw large
current, requiring a robust power delivery circuit and a heat-dissipation mechanism.
Example
An example from
software engineering is the
encoding of information and data. The date and time ''"2011-07-12 07:18:47"'' can be expressed as
Unix time with the 32-bit
signed integer 1310447927, consuming only 4
bytes. Represented as
ISO 8601 formatted
UTF-8 encoded
string
String or strings may refer to:
*String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...
2011-07-12 07:18:47 the date would consume 19 bytes, a size overhead of 375% over the binary integer representation. As
XML this date can be written as follows with an overhead of 218 characters, while adding the semantic context that it is a CHANGEDATE with index 1.
2011
07
12
07
18
47
The 349 bytes resulting from the UTF-8 encoded XML correspond to a size overhead of 8725% over the original integer representation.
See also
*
Overhead (business)
Engineering concepts
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