How do IC's work?

Question

what do Integrated Circuits do and what makes them do it?

and what are they used for and what rolls do they proform?

Answer 1

Integrated circuit chips are the most highly evolved electronic species to date, so to speak.

Integrated circuits evolved from transistors which evolved from radio tubes which evolved from lightbulbs. A Canadian engineer discovered the principle of electric amplifiers when they cut the filament of a lightbulb, breaking the circuit. A third wire was inserted into the gap. When the voltage between the gap was increased, minute amounts of current in the third wire begin to influence the passage of current through the gap. This was the first radio tube, able to amplify a tiny amount of current - think of the gap as the speaker circuit and the third wire as the antenna circuit. This was the beginning of "wireless" communication and the telegraph was quickly abandoned. Americans then "borrowed" this invention and improved it until voice transmission was possible. This helps to explain why old radio sets are collections of vacuum tubes.

The problem with vacuum tubes is that they are large and comsume a lot of electrical power. In the late 1940's an American electrical engineer discovered that tiny germanium crystals could be used like a radio tube. This was the first transistor. Transistors were far smaller than radio tubes and consumed far less power. Transistor radios were small enough to be carried around and became extremely popular in the 1960's.

The first digital computer was constructed in 1940. It was composed entirely of radio tubes and was very large, generated a lot of heat, consumed a lot of power and needed constant repair as the tubes burned out. It was used to instantaneously calculate missle trajectories during world war 2. After the war, the first transistor based computers were used by large businesses. This next generation was smaller and more reliable because of the transistors. However these machines were still very large and also extremely expensive.

Space flight requires an absolute minimum of weight. Flights to the moon demanded computers which were tiny and lightweight. This third generation of computers ran on integrated circuit chips. The chips packed hundreds of individual transistors into a very small space. This was because the transistors were now etched as a pattern onto a silicon wafer. The silicon plate was composed of three layers, each layer etched with a microscopic circuit pattern. Despite the technological sophistication of the process, the three layers still represented the two severed filaments of the lightbulb with the third filament in between.

Computer IC's began to be mass manufactured in the 1970's and the price of computers began to decrease. The first popular consumer item based on computer chips was the electronic calculator. It wasn't long before "personal computers" appeared on the market and IC circuits have gotten smaller and more powerful ever since then. Today, computer IC chips are everywhere, functioning as tiny, programmable computers. Such a device is known as an "embedded system".

The IC circuits in a computer are what are known as "flip flops". Several transistors form a circuit which can be turned on or off like a light switch. Eight switches comprise an on/off pattern known as a "byte". The patterns are then used to code binary information inside the computer.

Twenty or thirty transistors can be embedded into a chip which acts like a sort of super amplifier. This is known as an "Operational Amplifier". The circuit calculates the differences in two input voltages and amplifies the result. "Op Amp" chips are probably more important than even computer IC's, since so many circuits can be built with Op Amp chips.

Most modern consumer goods are based on specially designed IC chips particularly suited for a certain application. A good example is a digital alarm clock. Most have a single large chip which keeps track of time, displays the result and is even programmable. Digital music relies on an "Analog to Digital Converter" chip. It takes a digital pattern and generates the electrical waveforms necessary to operate the speakers. "ADC" chips contain hundreds of transistors and if each transistor were a radio tube, the circuit would probably stretch 2 by 4 feet.

I don't precisely know what the next generation of IC's will be like, but the trend continues to be miniaturization. Future IC's may rely on "Quantum effects" as they approach the size of atoms. Quantum mechanics is a branch of subatomic physics which studies the behaviour of subatomic particles. This is a very strange environment where particles exist, vanish from our universe and suddenly re-appear elsewhere. Subatomic particles can also exist in more than 1 place at a time. If this bizzare behaviour can be turned into something practical, there seems no limit to what future IC circuits will be capable of doing.

Answer 2

Its all philosophical. You may be lead to believe all of the above, but its really they are pieces of plastic with little metal lugs hanging out. They do now exactly as they did back in the 70s when they first started to appear. They do what you expect them to do.

Like life itself, it just starts, lives, and then passes away with time, so does the perception of what you receieve when you are told an IC is performing a function. An engineer says, an IC contains a radio circuit, so whenits connected to the speaker and battery etc, you hear music and djs because you expect it to, not because it is actually doing it. If you concentrate, you can start to neutralize this brainwash that has the world running around with chps in their ears, behind glass tubes, in the crs, appliances etc. They only work because you believe they are. 20 years ago 5 megs of data was a lot to squeeze on a hard disk 30cm in diameter, but now we have 5000000 megs on a disk 3cm the in size, but it flls up in the same amount of time. Where are these signals going, or even coming from? Our mind. Put an IC on the table with the lrgs up, and it does nothing. This is its true state. In fact it works the same way with the legs down.

It is a device to create money in a false economy, similar to the online games and virtual economies, only they are virtual economies, in our virtual life, that believes ICs are doing something. When you see the reality you will emerge from this virtual world and be awakened.

Answer 3

Working Of Integrated Circuit

Answer 4

VERY simplistic answer...

IC's are monolithic devices that contain many ciricuits. There are a variety of functions such as amplifiers, counters, frequency generators, gates etc.

They are generally devices made of silicon that has been doped to form a depletion region, thus making them semiconductors. They are mass produced as "wafers" and diced (segmented and singulated). These die are then connected to the outside world with wire thinner than human hair by a process called wire bonding. The finished device is packaged in (usually) "Chip" form and put in a circuit somewhere.

Answer 5

All electronic circuits are composed of transistors, capacitors, and resistors. Electronic circuits are used in many every-day devices like i-Pods, cell phones, computers, gameboys, televisions, etc. etc.

One could design all of these with individual transistors, resistors, and capacitors, but they would be HUGE! You could not make a Gameboy, cell-phone, or i-Pod out of individual parts because they would be the size of a suitcase -- definitely not portable.

When individual transistors, resistors, and capacitors are INTEGRATED onto a single piece of silicon material, they can all be connected together with very tiny wires, and made to fit together in a much smaller area to form the CIRCUIT. Now, those i-Pods and cell phones can be made much smaller.

.

Answer 6

IC stands for integrated circuits.That means a complex circuit is fabricated in to IC with sutable inputs and outputs,which are in form of pins.Microprosser of computer is also a IC.

Answer 7

I am... bucolic, fairly dogmatic, pragmatic, dramatic, animalistic, realistic, apologetic, fantastic (maybe), linguistic and moronic!