INTEGRATED CIRCUIT (IC) CHIPS

Integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip is a set of electronic circuits on a small plate (chip) of semiconductor material. ICs have been made possible due to experimental discoveries that show semiconductor devices are able to perform the functions of vacuum tubes. This chip can be made much smaller than a discrete circuit that are made from independent components. See diagram below:

IC CHI

Integrated circuits chips are made ver! compact with having several billion transistors and other electronic components situated in an area the si"e of a fingernail. The integration of large numbers of tin! transistors into small chip was a big improvement using discrete over usual manual assembl! of circuits. The width of each of the conducting line in a circuit ma! become smaller and smaller as technolog! improves. #or example in $%%&' it dropped below (%% nanometres and in $%() it is expected to be in the tens of nanometres. IC chips can be classified into analog' digital and mixed signal. *nalog IC chips such as operational amplifiers' sensors' and power management circuits+ wor, b! processing continual signals. Their functions are li,e amplification' mixing' active filtering' and demodulation. -igital integrated circuits are -S s' microprocessors' and micro controllers that can contain from ( to millions of logic gates' multiplexers' flip.flops and other circuits in a few s/uare millimetres. The little si"e of these circuits is what allows high speed' low power dissipation and reduced production cost. ICs are also able to combine analogue and digital circuits on a single chip to create certain functions such as *0- converters and -0* converters. These mixed signals circuits offer smaller si"e and lower cost plus signal interference. Integrated circuits are commonl! used in all electronic e/uipments nowada!s. This has reall! revolutioni"ed the world of electronics such as' computers' home appliances' and mobile phones. *ll these electronics have become an indispensable part of our modern societies' and are made possible b! the low cost of producing integrated circuits. Integrated circuit chips have the advantage of cost and performance. The cost is low because the chips are printed with all their components b! photolithograph! rather than constructing one transistor at a time. erformance is high because the components are able to switch

/uic,l! and consume less power as a result of the small si"e and close proximit! of the components. This is not the same with their discrete counterparts. 1odern technolog! has further improved on IC chips with the multi.microprocessor paradigm. This is used b! Intel and *1- dual.core processors. 2ach core is able to manage its own tas, independentl! of the others. IC chips has successfull! restructured communications and bringing in new wa!s for instant exchange of information between people' nations and businesses across the world.

*bout 3tsource: rofessional electronic components supplier 3TS435C2.62T' providing hundreds of thousands of common parts.