PPA (power, performance, area)
Beginner
The three things every chip trades off: how much power it uses, how fast it runs and how big it is.
Novice
Power, performance (speed, usually the clock frequency) and area: the three main measures of a design’s quality. Improving one usually costs another.
Expert
The joint goal of the whole implementation flow. In synthesis you steer it with the clock target, effort settings, which cells you allow (fast and leaky or slow and frugal) and transformations such as retiming, clock gating and resource sharing. Synthesis PPA is an estimate; the numbers after routing are what ships.
Explained in Logic synthesis (Design Flow).