Integrated Circuits

An integrated circuit (IC), commonly called a chip, is a device made out of a semiconductor material called silicon, in which small electronic interconnected components like transistors, diodes, resistors and diodes are formed within the silicon and then wired together with interconnects layered on top of the silicon surface. They are built on a single piece of monocrystalline semiconductor material, usually silicon, and can contain collections of hundreds to billions of electronic components.

Integrated circuits are created using photolithography, a process that uses ultraviolet light to print the components onto a single substrate all at once — similar to the way you can make many prints of a photograph from a single negative. The efficiency of printing all the IC's components together means ICs can be produced more cheaply and reliably than using discrete components. Other benefits of ICs include:

• Extremely small size, so devices can be compact
• High reliability
• High-speed performance
• Low power consumption