(integrated circuits)

<electronics> (IC, or "chip") A microelectronic semiconductor device consisting of many interconnected transistors and other components. ICs are constructed ("fabricated") on a small rectangle (a "die") cut from a Silicon (or for special applications, Sapphire) wafer. This is known as the "substrate". Different areas of the substrate are "doped" with other elements to make them either "p-type" or "n-type" and polysilicon or aluminium tracks are etched in one to three layers deposited over the surface. The die is then connected into a package using gold wires which are welded to "pads", usually found around the edge of the die. Integrated circuits can be classified into analogue, digital and hybrid (both analogue and digital on the same chip). Digital integrated circuits can contain anything from one to millions of logic gates - inverters, AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates, flip-flops, multiplexors etc. on a few square millimeters. The small size of these circuits allows high speed, low power dissipation, and reduced manufacturing cost compared with board-level integration. The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Small Scale Integration (SSI) brought circuits containing transistors numbered in the tens. Later, Medium Scale Integration (MSI) contained hundreds of transistors. Further development lead to Large Scale Integration (LSI) (thousands), and VLSI (hundreds of thousands and beyond). In 1986 the first one megabyte RAM was introduced which contained more than one million transistors. LSI circuits began to be produced in large quantities around 1970 for computer main memories and pocket calculators. For the first time it became possible to fabricate a CPU or even an entire microprocesor on a single integrated circuit. The most extreme technique is wafer-scale integration which uses whole uncut wafers as components. [Where and when was the term "chip" introduced?] (1997-07-03)

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors) integrate into a small chip.

A linear integrated circuit or analog chip is a set of miniature electronic analog circuits formed on a single piece of semiconductor material.

A Readout integrated circuit (ROIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) specifically used for reading detectors of a particular type. They are compatible with different types of detectors such as infrared and ultraviolet.

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec (e.

<hardware> (ASIC) An integrated circuit designed to perform a particular function by defining the interconnection of a set of basic circuit building blocks drawn from a library provided by the circuit manufacturer. (1995-02-15)

Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.

The Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Program was a United States Department of Defense (DOD) research program that ran from 1980 to 1990. Its mission was to research and develop very high-speed integrated circuits for the United States Armed Forces.