A figure of merit (FOM) is a performance metric that characterizes the performance of a device, system, or method, relative to its alternatives.

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

References