This hardware component translates internal bus signals into standardized electrical or optical pulses for network transmission. It houses the media access control chip, which assigns the unique hardware address, and the physical layer transceiver for the cable connection. While older systems required these discrete add-in boards, current computer architectures usually integrate this functionality directly onto the main system board.
Heard on the job
Grab a gigabit Ethernet card from the supply closet and drop it into that pedestal server so we can bypass its dead onboard NIC.
Also heard as
- NIC
- network adapter