The deep tech glossary, written for the page.

GaNGallium nitride

A wide-bandgap semiconductor that switches faster and wastes less energy as heat than silicon. It is why a modern laptop charger is the size of a matchbox rather than a brick.

Buyers do not purchase the material, they purchase the smaller, cooler, faster-charging thing it makes possible. Lead with the outcome and keep GaN as the proof underneath it.

Tape-out

The moment a finished chip design is handed to a foundry for manufacture. It is effectively irreversible: a mistake found after tape-out costs a full mask set and months.

It is the single most legible milestone in a semiconductor story. Investors understand irreversibility, so a timeline anchored on tape-out reads as real in a way a feature roadmap does not.

Yield

The share of chips on a wafer that actually work. Small yield improvements move gross margin more than almost anything else in the business.

Yield is the number a technical buyer checks first and the number most websites omit. If yours is defensible, it belongs on the page, not in the appendix of a deck.

Autonomy stack

The layered software that turns sensor data into machine action: perception, localisation, planning and control. Each layer can be bought, built or licensed, and where a company draws that line is usually its real strategy.

This is the moat that never photographs. A homepage that shows only the robot sells the hardware; a homepage that shows the stack sells the company.

Sim-to-real

Training a behaviour in simulation and transferring it to physical hardware. Cheap and fast in simulation, and the gap between the two is where most robotics programmes actually fail.

Naming the sim-to-real gap and how you close it is a credibility move. It signals you have shipped hardware rather than demos, which is precisely the doubt a buyer holds.

Policy

In robot learning, the learned mapping from what the machine observes to what it does next. Not a document, not a rule set, and routinely confused with both.

A word your engineers use daily that means something else entirely to a procurement lead reading the same page. Define it inline or avoid it above the fold.

Mobile manipulator

A robot that both moves through a space and manipulates objects in it. Combining locomotion and manipulation is substantially harder than either alone.

The category name does the selling if the buyer knows it, and does nothing if they do not. Test whether your buyer says mobile manipulator or says the thing that picks and moves.

Teleoperation

A human operating the machine remotely, often as the fallback when autonomy reaches its limit, and often as the data source that trains the next model.

Founders hide it, fearing it reads as not-really-autonomous. Buyers usually read it as honest and de-risked. Framing decides which.

Cycle time

How long one complete operation takes, end to end. In industrial settings it converts directly into throughput and therefore into money.

The number that turns a robotics demo into a business case. A site with cycle time on it is talking to an operations buyer; a site without it is talking to a journalist.

State of healthSoH

How much usable capacity a battery retains against its original specification. It governs residual value, warranty exposure and whether a pack has a second life.

The pivot from selling batteries to selling battery intelligence. If your product estimates SoH better than the incumbent, that claim is the whole homepage.

Second-life decisioning

Determining whether a retired battery pack should be reused in a lower-demand application or sent for recycling, and proving that call with data.

Deeply unglamorous and enormously valuable. It converts a sustainability story into a balance-sheet story, which is the version a CFO will fund.

Digital MRVMeasurement, reporting and verification

Instrumented, software-based proof of a climate outcome, replacing spreadsheets and periodic audits with continuous evidence.

The category exists because trust in carbon claims collapsed. Position against that collapse: the product is not measurement, it is admissible evidence.

C-UASCounter-unmanned aircraft systems

Detecting, tracking, identifying and defeating hostile drones. The four verbs are separate problems and most vendors are genuinely strong at only one or two.

Say which of the four you own. A page claiming all four without evidence reads as a systems integrator, which is a different and lower-margin business.

Directional jamming

Radio-frequency interference aimed along a specific bearing rather than broadcast in all directions, so a threat is denied without disabling friendly systems nearby.

The word jamming alarms civilian buyers and regulators. Directional is the qualifier doing the reassurance, so it should never be dropped for brevity.

TRLTechnology readiness level

A one-to-nine scale for how proven a technology is, from observed principle to flight-proven system. Standard vocabulary in defence and space procurement.

Stating your TRL honestly is a filter, not a weakness. It removes buyers who cannot procure at your maturity and builds trust with those who can.

Assay

A defined procedure for measuring the presence, amount or activity of something biological. The unit of work in most life science laboratories.

The word marks the boundary between a research audience and a commercial one. If your buyer is a lab head it belongs on the page; if it is a hospital procurement lead it does not.

In silico

Done by computer simulation rather than in a test tube or a living organism. The whole promise of computational biotech sits in the phrase.

It sounds like jargon and functions as positioning: it is the claim that you replaced an expensive physical step. Make the replaced step explicit or the phrase does nothing.

GMPGood manufacturing practice

The regulated quality standard governing how a therapeutic or diagnostic is actually produced. Reaching GMP is a company-defining, capital-intensive threshold.

GMP status is the fact that separates a promising platform from a shippable product. If you have it, it belongs above the fold, not in a compliance footer.

Qubit

The basic unit of quantum information. Unlike a bit it can hold a combination of both states, which is the source of the advantage and of the fragility.

Raw qubit count is the number press releases use and the number specialists distrust. Quote it alongside quality or expect to be discounted by the people who matter.

Coherence time

How long a qubit holds its quantum state before noise destroys it. It sets a hard ceiling on how long a computation can run.

The honest counterweight to qubit count. A company leading on coherence is signalling engineering maturity rather than a headline.

Logical qubit

An error-corrected qubit assembled from many physical ones. The number that determines whether anything useful can actually be computed.

The distinction between physical and logical is where credibility is won or lost with a technical buyer. Collapsing the two on a homepage is the fastest way to lose an expert reader.

Inference

Running a trained model to produce an answer, as opposed to training, which builds the model. Inference is the part that runs continuously and therefore dominates cost at scale.

Training gets the headlines, inference sends the invoice. If your advantage is inference cost or latency, that is a CFO conversation and should be framed as one.

Edge AI

Running models on the device rather than in the cloud: lower latency, lower bandwidth, and data that never leaves the premises.

Usually sold on speed when it is bought on privacy and sovereignty. Check which one your actual buyer is nodding at.

Model weights

The learned parameters that constitute a trained model. Whether they are open, closed or licensed is a strategic and increasingly a legal question.

Your position on weights is a positioning statement whether you make one or not. Silence is read as closed.

Zero trust

An architecture that assumes no user or device is trustworthy by default, verifying every request rather than trusting anything inside the perimeter.

So heavily marketed that it has nearly stopped meaning anything. Use it to be found in search, then immediately say what you specifically do, or you blend into the category.

Attack surface

The total set of points where an attacker could attempt entry. Modern estimates are usually larger than the organisation believes.

The most effective framing device in security marketing, because it converts an abstract fear into a countable, and therefore reducible, number.

Dwell time

How long an intruder is inside a network before detection, typically measured in weeks or months rather than hours.

A single number that makes the cost of the status quo undeniable. If your product reduces it, that delta is the headline.

Photonic integrated circuitPIC

A chip that routes and manipulates light rather than electrons, moving far more data with far less heat.

Invisible, sub-millimetre and impossible to photograph usefully. This category lives or dies on 3D and animation more than any other on this list.

Interconnect

The links that move data between chips, boards and racks. As compute has scaled, interconnect rather than raw processing has become the bottleneck.

The pitch is that everyone is optimising the wrong component. That is a strong, contrarian narrative and it needs a diagram, not a paragraph.

SerDesSerialiser/deserialiser

The circuitry that converts parallel data to serial for transmission and back again. Unglamorous, ubiquitous and a genuine specialism.

A term with no consumer analogy at all. If it is your product, the homepage job is to build the analogy, because the buyer's boss will need one.

Digital thread

A continuous data record connecting design, production and service for a given part, so any unit can be traced back to the conditions that made it.

The word thread does real work: it implies continuity where competitors offer disconnected systems. Worth building the page architecture around.

Tolerance

The permitted deviation from a specified dimension. Tighter tolerance means higher cost and, past a point, a different class of machine entirely.

The most concrete proof of capability available to a manufacturer. A tolerance figure on a page does more than a paragraph about precision.

Additive manufacturing

Building a part by adding material layer by layer rather than cutting it away. Enables geometries that cannot be machined at all.

Say 3D printing to a generalist and additive to an engineer. Many sites need both words on the page for different readers.

Metamaterial

A material engineered so its structure, not its chemistry, produces properties not found in nature, such as bending light or sound in unnatural ways.

Sounds like science fiction, which cuts both ways. Anchor immediately to a shipped application or the claim is discounted as hype.

Composite layup

The sequence and orientation in which reinforcing fibres are laid before curing. The layup determines strength, weight and failure mode.

Where craft and engineering meet, and unusually photogenic. One of the few advanced materials subjects that rewards a real shoot over a render.

Feedstock

The raw input a process consumes. Availability, purity and price of feedstock often decide whether a materials company can scale at all.

Investors ask about feedstock before they ask about performance. A site silent on supply reads as a lab result rather than a business.

Telemetry

Measurements taken remotely and transmitted back automatically. The raw material of every connected-systems product.

Nobody buys telemetry. They buy the decision it enables. Name the decision.

LPWANLow-power wide-area network

Connectivity built for devices that send small amounts of data over long distances on batteries lasting years.

The acronym is a filter: use it and you are addressing an infrastructure buyer, not an operations one. Pick deliberately.

OTA updateOver the air

Updating device software remotely, without physical access. The difference between a fleet you can fix and one you must visit.

Boring to engineers, decisive to buyers. It answers the unspoken question of what happens when something goes wrong after deployment.

Open RAN

Radio access network architecture using open interfaces so operators can mix vendors instead of buying a single closed stack.

The whole category is an argument against vendor lock-in. Your positioning is either with the incumbents or against them, and neutrality reads as evasion.

Network slicing

Partitioning one physical network into isolated virtual networks, each with guaranteed characteristics for a specific use.

Abstract until it is grounded in an application: a slice for surgical robotics behaves differently from a slice for meter reading. Lead with the application.

Backhaul

The links carrying traffic from edge sites back to the core network. Frequently the constraint that decides what the edge can actually do.

A bottleneck word. If you solve backhaul, the story is about unlocking something else, and that something else is the headline.

Zero-knowledge proofZK

A method of proving a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. Increasingly used well outside cryptocurrency, for identity and compliance.

The strongest non-crypto story in this category. Leading with privacy and compliance rather than tokens reaches an entirely different, better-funded buyer.

Rollup

Executing transactions off the main chain and posting compressed proofs back to it, for throughput without abandoning the base layer's security.

Jargon-dense and internally contested. If a general buyer must understand it, the page needs a diagram and a plain-language sentence, in that order.

Validator

A participant that verifies transactions and secures the network, usually by staking capital against honest behaviour.

The word carries an economic model inside it. Explaining the incentive is more persuasive than explaining the mechanism.

6DoFSix degrees of freedom

Tracking both rotation and position, so a user can lean, crouch and walk rather than only look around.

The difference between a demo that impresses and one that induces nausea. If you have it, say it; the specialist audience is checking.

Passthrough

Showing the real world through a headset's cameras so digital content can be layered onto it, rather than replacing the view entirely.

The bridge term between VR and AR for a buyer who has stopped tracking the distinction. Often clearer than either acronym.

Foveated rendering

Rendering at full detail only where the eye is actually looking, tracking gaze to save enormous amounts of compute.

A rare deep tech concept with an intuitive human explanation. Use the eye analogy; it lands in one sentence with any audience.

Digital twin

A simulation of a physical asset kept continuously in sync with the real thing through live data, used to predict behaviour and test changes safely.

Applied to everything from a pump to a city, so it has lost precision. Say what is twinned and at what fidelity, or the term works against you.

Dual-use

Technology with both civilian and military application. It changes who can invest, who can buy, and what can be published.

It reshapes the whole communication problem: two audiences, two procurement paths, and constraints on what the site may say. Plan the architecture around it from the start.

Technology readiness

How far a technology has travelled from laboratory principle to deployed system, and the single question every serious buyer is really asking.

Most deep tech sites overstate it by omission. Stating maturity plainly loses the wrong buyers early, which is the cheapest thing that can happen to you.