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BEDO
Burst EDO is a variant on EDO DRAM in which read or write cycles are batched in bursts of four. Burst EDO bus speeds range from 40MHz to 66MHz, as opposed to the 33MHz bus speeds that can be accomplished using fast page mode or EDO DRAM.

BGA
See Ball Grid Array

BIOS
Basic input/output system. Often referred to as CMOS, the BIOS provides an interface for a computer's hardware and software. The BIOS configuration determines how your hardware is accessed.

Ball Grid Array
A type of memory chip with solder balls on the underside for mounting. Use of BGA allows die package size to be reduced because there is more surface area for attachment. Smaller packaging allows more components to be mounted on a module, making greater densities available. The smaller package also improves heat dissipation for better performance. See CSP and FBGA.

Bandwidth
A measure of the capacity of data that can be moved between two points in a given period of time.

Bank
1. A slot or group of slots that must be populated with modules of like capacity in order to fulfill the data width requirement of the CPU
2. A segment of memory on a module, sometimes also referred to as a row. Modules are either single or dual banked
3. An internal logic segment in a memory component. For example, a 64Mb SDRAM has 4 banks.

Binary
Numbering system based on two digits: 0 and 1.

Bit
Binary digit. The smallest piece of data (a 1 or a 0) that a computer recognizes.

Block
A physical unit of information in a logical record. Block size is usually expressed in bytes.

Block Diagram
A circuit or system drawing concerned with major functions and interconnections between functions.

BSoD
The Blue Screen of Death (sometimes called "bluescreen", "stop error" or just abbreviated as "BSoD") is a popular name for the screen displayed by Microsoft's Windows operating system when it cannot recover from, or is in danger of being unable to recover from, a system error. There are two Windows error screens that are both referred to as the blue screen of death, with one (Windows NT 4/2000/XP) being significantly more serious than the other (Windows 9x).

The blue screen of death in one form or another has been present in all Windows operating systems since Windows version 3.1. It is the successor of the less well-known black screen of death that occurs in OS/2 as well as MS-DOS. In early builds of Windows Vista it was complemented with the red screen of death, used for boot loader errors.

Buffered Memory
A buffer isolates the memory from the controller to minimize the load on the chip set. It is typically used when the system has a high density of memory and/or when a system has more than 3 memory module sockets.

Burn-in
The process of exercising an integrated circuit at elevated voltage and temperature. This process accelerates failures normally seen as "infant mortality" in a chip. (Those chips that would fail early during actual usage will fail during burn-in. Those that pass have a life expectancy much greater than that required for normal usage.)

Bus
Circuitry that is used to move data

Byte
A series of 8 bits.