BEC's, which is short for Battery Eliminator Circuit is a fancy RC hobby term for a DC-DC converter that steps down the voltage to a given value used for example by servos and control electronics such as radio gear and flight controllers.
In the market there are two main types, most of which convert from a higher voltage to 5-6 Volts DC. These can either be of the linear type, or switching mode. The first is the simplest, where a simple linear regulator is used to drop the voltage to a constant value at the output. These tend to be very low noise steady sources of voltage, but have the disadvantage of being quite inefficient, getting worse the higher the input-output voltage differential. A considerable amount of energy is wasted in the form of heat.
