61,984 articles
Soft error
A soft error is a transient, nondestructive circuit fault in which a high-energy particle strike, from cosmic-ray neutrons or alpha particles, changes a memory cell state without damaging hardware.
Soft ExoSuit
The Soft ExoSuit is a clothing-like wearable robot developed at Harvard's Wyss Institute under Conor Walsh that assists walking, best known for improving gait after stroke.
Soft handover
Soft handover, also written soft handoff, is a make-before-break handover mechanism in CDMA cellular systems in which a mobile communicates with two or more base stations at once.
Soft hyphen
The soft hyphen (U+00AD, SHY) is an invisible Unicode character marking where a word may break, showing a hyphen only if the line breaks there.
Soft interference cancellation
Soft interference cancellation is an iterative wireless receiver technique that subtracts soft estimates of interfering signals, refining them by exchanging soft information with channel decoders.
Soft jumping and rolling robots
Soft jumping and rolling robots are mobile robots built largely from compliant materials like silicone, moving by ballistic leaps or rolling to clear obstacles and cross terrain.
Soft lithography
Soft lithography is a family of non-photolithographic microfabrication techniques that use an elastomeric stamp or mold to pattern features from 30 nm to 100 μm.
Soft magnetic composite
A soft magnetic composite, also called a magnetic powder core, is a magnetic core made of insulated iron powder pressed into shape, used in electric motors and transformers.
Soft microprocessor
A soft microprocessor, also called a soft or softcore processor, is a processor core described in a hardware description language and synthesized onto an FPGA rather than fixed silicon.
Soft robotic hands with pneumatic actuation
A soft robotic hand with pneumatic actuation is a multi-fingered gripper whose elastomeric fingers bend when air chambers inflate, the most widely used soft grasping technology.
Soft robotics
Soft robotics: robots built from compliant materials like elastomers and hydrogels, actuated by fluidic, SMA, EAP, magnetic, light, sound, or chemical means, for safe medical, agricultural, and unstructured-environment use.
Soft Robotics (company)
Soft Robotics Inc. was an American robotics company founded in 2013 as a Harvard spinoff that built soft pneumatic grippers for handling delicate food products.
Soft starter
A soft starter is a motor-control device that ramps voltage to an AC induction motor during starting and stopping, limiting inrush current and starting torque on pumps, fans, and conveyors.
Soft story
A soft story is a building story, often an open ground floor, whose lateral stiffness is much lower than the stories above it, making it vulnerable in earthquakes.
Soft switching
Soft switching is a power electronics technique that turns transistors on or off at zero voltage (ZVS) or zero current (ZCS) via resonance, reducing switching losses and electromagnetic interference compared with hard switching.
Soft underwater robot
A soft underwater robot is an aquatic robot built from compliant materials like silicone, inspired by octopuses and fish for gentle reef observation and sampling.
Soft-core processor implementation on FPGAs
A soft-core processor is a CPU described in a hardware description language and synthesized onto an FPGA's generic logic fabric, offering portability and lower cost than fixed silicon cores.
Soft-decision decoding
Soft-decision decoding is a family of error-correction methods that pass each received symbol's reliability to the decoder, gaining roughly 1.5 to 2.3 dB over hard decisions.
Soft-decision FEC
Soft-decision FEC (SD-FEC) is forward error correction that decodes using multi-level, confidence-bearing receiver output, typically using LDPC or turbo product codes for about 3 dB more gain than hard-decision codes.
Soft-input soft-output
Soft-input soft-output (SISO) is a decoder design that passes reliability information, usually log-likelihood ratios, between receiver components so iterative schemes like turbo decoding can converge, using algorithms such as the BCJR of 1974.
Soft-output MIMO detection
Soft-output MIMO detection is a receiver component that separates spatially multiplexed MIMO data streams and computes a log-likelihood ratio for each coded bit for the channel decoder.
Soft-output Viterbi algorithm
The soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) is a variant of the Viterbi algorithm that also gives a reliability value for each decoded symbol, introduced by Hagenauer and Hoeher in 1989.
Softail
Softail is a family of Harley-Davidson cruiser motorcycles with a hidden rear shock that preserves the vintage hard tail look, introduced in 1984 and still the basis of the company's Cruiser lineup.
SoftBank AI investments
SoftBank's AI investments are the Japanese technology group's debt-financed funding of frontier AI, centered on $64.6 billion committed to OpenAI for about 13% ownership and the Stargate data-center project.
SoftBank Mobile
SoftBank Mobile (ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社) was a Japanese mobile carrier, formed from J-PHONE and Vodafone K.K. and acquired by SoftBank in 2006, renamed SoftBank Corp. in 2015.
SoftBank Robotics
SoftBank Robotics Group Corp. is the Tokyo-headquartered robotics business of Japan's SoftBank Group, known for the humanoid robot Pepper, launched in 2014, and the Whiz cleaning robot.
SoftHand
The Pisa/IIT SoftHand is an anthropomorphic robotic hand with 19 degrees of freedom driven by a single motor, developed at the University of Pisa and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.
SoftKey
SoftKey, also known as SoftKey International, was a Canadian consumer software company founded by Kevin O'Leary in Toronto in 1986, a low-price consolidator of educational software.
Softphone
A softphone is a software application that places and receives telephone calls over the internet, connecting to a VoIP provider instead of a physical desk phone.
Softswitch
A softswitch, also called a call agent, call server, or media gateway controller, is software that performs telephone exchange call-control functions on general-purpose hardware, directing calls between media gateways.