What is an Integrated Circuit (IC)?

Integrated Circuit (IC) also called micro electric chip, microchip, or chip. It is a group of electronic circuits placed on a metal plate designed with semiconductor materials.

Integrated circuits are one of the indispensable circuit elements of electronics in many electronic devices that we use in our daily lives. it has its origin in the invention of transistors in 1947 by William B. Shockley and his team at AT&T Bell laboratories. The team found that under the right circumstances, electrons would form a barrier at the surface of certain crystals, and they learned to control the flow of electricity (flow of charges) through the crustal by manipulating the barrier.

An integrated circuit (IC) can consist of thousands or even millions of:

  • Transistors
  • Resistors
  • Capacitors
  • Diodes

Definition of Integrated Chip

An IC is the fundamental building block of all modern electronic circuits. ICs are made up of several components such as R, C, L, diodes and transistors as active devices and capacitors and resistors as passive devices, and their interconnections are built up on a thin substrate of semiconductor material typically silicon. An IC can function as an amplifier, oscillator, timer, counter, logic gate, microcontroller, or microprocessor.

One common example of a modern-day IC is a computer processor, which typically contains millions or billions of transistors, capacitors, logic gates, etc., connected together to form a complex digital circuit. Although the processor is an IC, not all ICs are processors. so in this article, we will go through what is ICs, the types of ICs, the pros & cons of ICs, and so on. In simple words, Integrated Circuits are the Integration of active components(transistors) and passive components(resistors, capacitors) into a silicon chip.

Integrated Circuits

Integrated circuits (ICs) also called microelectric chips are used to create a device that can perform certain electrical operations such as signal amplification which is called a transistor from the combination of words of the transfer and resistor. Solid-state electronics is the name given to the field of research into how to make electronic devices out of solid materials.

They are standard ICs available that work as power regulators, amplifiers, simple signal processors, and so on. ICs range from 8-pin to 16-pin packages in which the common package has two rows of pins, A 20-pin DIL package will have 2 rows of ten pins. Bigger integrated circuits or chips are used for complex digital applications such as oriented IC.

Table of Content

  • What is an Integrated Circuit (IC)?
  • Integrated Circuit Design
  • Classification of ICs
  • Integrated Circuit Construction
  • Functions of Integrated Circuit
  • Advantages of Integrated Circuits
  • Disadvantages of Integrated Circuits
  • Applications of Integrated Circuits

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