Technology and the built world

Fractile

Fractile is a British semiconductor startup, founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin as an Oxford spin-out, developing memory-centric chips for AI inference, with first deployments targeted for 2027.

Fraction of inspired oxygen

Fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) is the fraction of oxygen in inhaled gas, 0.209 for room air and up to 1.00 for pure oxygen, central to oxygen therapy and ventilation.

Fractional orbital bombardment system

A fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) is an orbital nuclear weapons delivery system developed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, which deorbits a warhead before completing a full orbit.

Fractional programming is the branch of optimization that maximizes or minimizes ratios of functions, such as signal-to-noise ratio or energy efficiency, solved with Dinkelbach's transform and the quadratic transform.

Fractionally spaced equalization

Fractionally spaced equalization is an adaptive equalization technique whose filter taps are spaced at a fraction of the symbol period, sampling faster than the symbol rate.

Fractionally spaced equalizer

A fractionally spaced equalizer is an adaptive equalizer whose filter taps are spaced at a fraction of the symbol period, typically half, rather than a full symbol period.

Fractographic analysis

Fractographic analysis is the examination of a fracture surface, typically by optical or electron microscopy, to determine how a component broke, identifying the failure mode, crack-initiation site, and often the loads involved.

Fractography

Fractography is the examination of fracture surfaces, by eye, light microscope, or scanning electron microscope, to determine where a crack started, how it grew, and why the component failed.

Fracture testing

Fracture testing is a family of mechanical test methods that measure a cracked metal specimen's resistance to crack extension, yielding toughness values like K, J, and CTOD.

Frade Oil and Gas Field

The Frade Oil and Gas Field is a deepwater oil field in Brazil's Campos Basin, discovered by Petrobras in 1986 and operated since 2020 by PRIO.

Fragility analysis

Fragility analysis is a probabilistic reliability method of structural and earthquake engineering that estimates the probability a structure reaches a defined damage state at a given hazard intensity.

Fragility curve

A fragility curve, in earthquake engineering, gives the conditional probability that a structure exceeds a defined damage state given the intensity of ground motion, and links seismic hazard to expected losses.

Fragmentation (computing)

Fragmentation in computing is the scattering of a file or allocated memory across noncontiguous locations on a disk or in physical memory, hindering performance and allocations.

Fragmentation (weaponry)

Fragmentation is a damage mechanism of explosive munitions in which the casing breaks apart or preformed fragments are hurled outward at high velocity on detonation.

Fraktur

Fraktur, also called Fraktur typeface, is a blackletter typeface with broken strokes that served as the standard print face for German from the early 1500s until 1941.

Fram (satellite bus)

Fram (Фрам), also designated Zenit-4MKT, was a Soviet recoverable satellite of the Zenit family that took multispectral photographs of Earth for natural-resources research from 1975 to 1985.

Fram Oil and Gas Field

Fram is an oil and gas field in the northern Norwegian North Sea, 20 km north of Troll, discovered in 1990 and producing since 2003, operated by Equinor.

Fram2

Fram2 was a privately funded SpaceX mission from March 31 to April 4, 2025, the first crewed spaceflight into a polar orbit over Earth's poles.

Framatome

Framatome is a French nuclear energy company owned by EDF (80.5%) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, supplying reactor equipment, fuel assemblies, and services to more than 250 reactors worldwide.

Frame aggregation

Frame aggregation is a MAC layer technique in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, introduced by 802.11n in 2009, that packs multiple data frames into a single large frame so per-frame overhead is paid once.

Frame generation (graphics)

Frame generation is a real-time graphics technique that inserts AI-synthesized frames between rendered ones, introduced to PC gaming by NVIDIA's DLSS 3 in October 2022.

Frame problem

The frame problem is a problem in logic-based artificial intelligence: how a reasoning system that represents the world as facts can determine what an action leaves unchanged.

Frame rate

Frame rate, also known as frames per second, is the frequency at which consecutive images, called frames, are captured or displayed in a moving image sequence.

Frame Relay

Frame Relay is a connection-oriented packet-switching technology for wide area networks that carries data in frames over virtual circuits, dominant in the late 20th century before Ethernet and IP services replaced it.

Frame synchronization

Frame synchronization is the receiver task of locating where data frames begin and end in a received bit or symbol stream, so the payload can be correctly segmented and decoded.

Frame transfer CCD

The frame transfer CCD is an image sensor with an imaging array and an equally sized light-shielded storage array, invented at Bell Labs in the early 1970s and used in scientific and high-speed imaging.

FrameNet

FrameNet is a lexical database of English organized around semantic frames, established in 1997 by Charles J. Fillmore in Berkeley and used for semantic role labeling in natural language processing.

Framer

Framer is a Netherlands-based no-code website builder, started by Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, where users design pages on a visual canvas and publish them to managed hosting.

Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence

The Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence is the first international legally binding treaty on AI, adopted by the Council of Europe and opened for signature in September 2024.