Terminologies

System BIOS or Main BIOS

A firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup), and provides runtime services for operating systems and programs.

EC Firmware

A firmware for embedded controller chip or Super I/O Controller which is responsible for controlling low-bandwith I/O devices such as keyboard, mouse, thermal controller, charging/discharging of battery, laptop’s power sequence, etc.

ME/TXE Region

Intel Management Engine (ME) is an autonomouse subsystem that has been incorporated in all of Intel’s proccessor chipsets starting in 2008.

SPI Dump (Bios Dump)

These are firmware that are dumped from laptop’s SPI Chips. SPI dumps are classified into three categories - EC firmware dump, System Bios or sometimes ME Region dump.

Stock Firmware

This is an untouched and unmodified firmware that comes directly from manufacturer website. It can be an EC firmware or System BIOS.

BIOS Region

Bios region is one of the most critical region of a UEFI firmware. OEM customization and vendor-specific drivers are inside this region.

BIN/FD File

Common extension name for EC/System Bios firmware. Other filenames are CAP, WPH, FL1, FL2,, etc. Asus uses bios version as extension name.

UEFI

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a publicly available specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI replaces the legacy Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) boot firmware originally present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers, with most UEFI firmware implementations providing support for legacy BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even with no operating system installed.

DMI

The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) generates a standard framework for managing and tracking components in a desktop, notebook or server computer, by abstracting these components from the software that manages them.

NVRAM

NVRAM (non-volatile random-access memory) refers to computer memory that can hold data even when power to the memory chips has been turned off. NVRAM is a subset of the larger category of non-volatile memory (NVM), which includes storage-class memory based on NAND flash. Flash memory chips are slower to read to and write from than RAM chips, making them less well suited for active computational memory.