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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
motherboard
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ How well is the motherboard fitted?
▪ If the new motherboard is smaller then you will have some mounting pillars left over - keep them safe.
▪ If they prove popular then the company may develop its own motherboards.
▪ It has up to four motherboards, each with 16 fully switched High Performance Transputer Modules.
▪ The motherboards are arranged in four clusters that communicate through a single backplane.
▪ There two ways to upgrade to a 386 - by adding a coprocessor card and by replacing the motherboard.
▪ They regarded its motherboard, the main circuit board, as a beautiful work of art.
▪ This mishap has caused Intel to reevaluate its strategy in selling so-called motherboards, analysts said.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
motherboard

motherboard \moth"er*board`\ n. (Electronics) The board containing the main circuits of an electronic device, especially computers. The term is used primarily in microcomputer literature, where it designates the board containing the main expansion bus, and usually also the cpu. On motherboards designed with an expansion bus, often all of the circuits not contained on an expansion card are on the motherboard.

Wiktionary
motherboard

n. (context computer hardware English) the primary circuit board of a personal computer, containing the circuitry for the central processing unit, keyboard, mouse and monitor, together with slots for other devices

Wikipedia
Motherboard

A motherboard (sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, baseboard, planar board or logic board, or colloquially, a mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) found in general purpose microcomputers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general purpose use.

Motherboard specifically refers to a PCB with expansion capability and as the name suggests, this board is often referred to as the "mother" of all components attached to it, which often include peripherals, interface cards, and daughtercards: sound cards, video cards, network cards, hard drives, or other forms of persistent storage; TV tuner cards, cards providing extra USB or FireWire slots and a variety of other custom components.

Similarly, the term mainboard is applied to devices with a single board and no additional expansions or capability, such as controlling boards in laser printers, televisions, washing machines and other embedded systems with limited expansion abilities.

Usage examples of "motherboard".

Parts of the onboard computer, including the motherboard, had been found.

It was only in retrospect, sometime in the early sixties I think, that we realized that the entire vehicle, minus creature comforts and skin, was basically a series of circuit boards inserted into a gigantic motherboard that was the whole lower deck of the thing.

It was only recently that we realized, with this scan and the old autopsy reports and correlation with the saucer as known, that not only was everything aboard plugged into that motherboard directly or indirectly, but so were the crew.

I had told Wilma that what we perceived as a monstrous computer motherboard was simply a representation of what was probably there.

Behold: the first motherboard was already in a chassis, being alpha-tested hastily, in the circumstances.

It felt almost as if they were gnats inside a giant old-fashioned computer box, with the floor a great motherboard covered with winding lines and square-chunked chips.

The cushions tried to adjust for him, but he kept shifting, and one of the warping fields had burned out long ago, leaving a band a few centimeters wide that stayed stiff and straight as a motherboard and screwed up the whole system.

He had just finished attaching a new set of attenuators to a faulty motherboard when his cellular phone sprang to life.

Thanks to its motherboard of quantum chips, the machine would run faster than Cray supercomputers.

Laurent could see what Randy was referring to -- a mass of black cables that terminated in plugs which went into a large motherboard mounted on the wall.

He had just finished attaching a new set of attenuators to afaulty motherboard when his cellular phone sprang to life.

She had all the time she needed to search the panels below the dashboard, find the one whose ventilation slits suggested the presence of electronics, open it, identify the motherboard, and yank it out.

Then, hesitating only briefly, she put the motherboard back where it belonged.

He could, if that action became suddenly necessary, yank it free, find the motherboard, and remove the foreign chip.

But before he could open the panel, much less remove the motherboard or cleanse it of its parasitic infection, the Hawk pitched into a forward roll, like a diver from a board.