engineering Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...

, 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 that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, a particular

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

might draw large

current Currents, Current or The Current may refer to: Science and technology * Current (fluid), the flow of a liquid or a gas ** Air current, a flow of air ** Ocean current, a current in the ocean *** Rip current, a kind of water current ** Current (hydr ...

, requiring a robust power delivery circuit and a heat-dissipation mechanism.

Example

An example from

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

is the

encoding In communications and Data processing, information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter (alphabet), letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes data compression, shortened or ...

of information and data. The date and time ''"2011-07-12 07:18:47"'' can be expressed as

Unix time Unix time is a date and time representation widely used in computing. It measures time by the number of non-leap seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time, UTC on 1 January 1970, the Unix Epoch (computing), epoc ...

with the 32-bit signed

integer An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...). The negations or additive inverses of the positive natural numbers are referred to as negative in ...

1310447927, consuming only 4

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

s. Represented as

ISO 8601 ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the worldwide exchange and communication of date and time-related data. It is maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988, with updates in ...

formatted

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

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 Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

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.

Example

See also