Integrated Chips (ICs)

An integrated circuit -- also called an IC, a chip, or a microchip -- packs thousands to millions of transistors, resistors and capacitors onto a single small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. ICs offer two decisive advantages over circuits built from discrete components: COST and PERFORMANCE, and the advancement of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technology keeps letting more and more transistors fit onto a chip of the same physical size, which is why computers, mobile phones and other digital appliances keep shrinking while getting more capable, mirroring the historical arc traced back in the unit's own opening (9.1, Figure 9.1). ICs are broadly of two kinds. DIGITAL ICs use logic gates and work only with the two discrete values 1 and 0 -- a low signal on a digital-IC component gives a value of 0 and a high signal gives 1 -- and find their main use in computers, networking equipment and most consumer electronics. ANALOG (or linear) ICs instead work with continuous values, so a component on a linear IC can take, and output, any value across its range -- l …