An integrated circuit (IC), sometimes called a chip or microchip, is an electronic device on semiconductor on which thousands or millions of tiny resistors, capacitors, and transistors are fabricated. An IC can be designed and used as an amplifier, oscillator, timer, counter, computer memory, audio and video equipment, or microprocessor. Among the most advanced integrated circuits are the microprocessors, which drive everything from computers to cellular phones to digital microwave ovens. Digital memory chips are another family of integrated circuits that are widely used in today's computing world. ASIC is a kind of IC for specific applications.
There are linear/analog or digital IC chips. Linear ICs have continuously variable outputthat linearly depends on the input signal level. Linear ICs are used as audio-frequency (AF) and radio-frequency (RF) amplifiers. The fundamental building blocks of digital ICs are logic gates, which work with binary data, that is, signals that have only two different states, called low (logic 0) and high (logic 1). These devices are used in computers, computer networks, modems, and frequency counters.
Integrated circuits are often classified by its capacity, which is measured by the number of transistors and other electronic components contained on a chip:
- SSI (small-scale integration): Up to 100 electronic components per chip
- MSI (medium-scale integration): From 100 to 3,000 electronic components per chip
- LSI(large-scale integration): From 3,000 to 100,000 electronic components per chip
- VLSI(very large-scale integration): From 100,000 to 1,000,000 electronic components per chip
- ULSI(ultra large-scale integration): More than 1 million electronic components per chip
People now are putting a complete System on a Chip (SoC) to meet the increasing needs of higher level integration for better performance and smaller device sizes.
Related Terms: Logic gate, System on a Chip (SoC), Analog Chip, Digital Chip