Figure of merit

Examples

• Absolute alcohol content per currency unit in an alcoholic beverage
• Accuracy of a rifle
• Audio amplifier figures of merit such as gain or efficiency
• Battery life of a laptop computer
• Calories per serving
• Clock rate of a CPU is often given as a figure of merit, but is of limited use in comparing between different architectures. FLOPS may be a better figure, though these too are not completely representative of the performance of a CPU.
• Contrast ratio of an LCD
• Frequency response of a speaker
• Fill factor of a solar cell
• Resolution of the image sensor in a digital camera
• Measure of the detection performance of a sonar system, defined as the propagation loss for which a 50% detection probability is achieved
• Noise figure of a radio receiver
• The thermoelectric figure of merit, zT, a material constant proportional to the efficiency of a thermoelectric couple made with the material
• The figure of merit of digital-to-analog converter, calculated as (power dissipation)/(2ENOB × effective bandwidth) [J/Hz]
• Luminous efficacy of lighting
• Profit of a company
• Residual noise remaining after compensation in an aeromagnetic survey
• Heat absorption and transfer quality for a solar cooker
• Performance of transparent conducting thin-film materials, such as FTO, calculated as (transparency)10/(surface resistivity)

Computational benchmarks are synthetic figures of merit that summarize the speed of algorithms or computers in performing various typical tasks.

References

References

1. (2014). "Analytical Figures of Merit". Elsevier.
2. (2020). "Figures of Merit". Elsevier.
3. Minshall, David. "Measuring Accuracy".
4. [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/technology/personaltech/25pogue.html Decoding Battery Life For Laptops] New York Times, June 25, 2009