another name for an integrated circuit
Photo: An integrated circuit from the inside. If you could lift the cover off a typical microchip like the one in the top photo (and you can't very easily—believe me, I've tried!), this is what you'd find inside. The integrated circuit is the tiny square in the center. Connections run out from it to the terminals (metal pins or legs) around the edge. When you hook up something to one of these terminals, you're actually connecting into the circuit itself. 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 plate (chip) of semiconductor material, normally silicon. This can be made much smaller than a discrete circuit made from independent electronic components. A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) has two or more layers of active electronic components that are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. Communication between layers uses on-die signaling, so power consumption is much lower than in equivalent separate circuits. An application-specific IC (ASIC) can be either a digital or an analog circuit. As their name implies, ASICs are not reconfigurable; they perform only one specific function. For example, a speed controller IC for a remote control car is hard-wired to do one job and could never become a microprocessor. The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Early digital circuits containing tens of transistors provided a few logic gates, and early linear ICs such as the Plessey SL201 or the Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. Integrated circuits changed all that. The basic idea was to take a complete circuit, with all its many components and the connections between them, and recreate the whole thing in microscopically tiny form on the surface of a piece of silicon. Integrated circuit from an EPROM memory microchip showing the memory blocks, the supporting circuitry and the fine silver wires which connect the integrated circuit die to the legs of the packaging. transistorAT&T Bell Labs/Science Photo Library/Photo Researchers, Inc.Integrated circuits have their origin in the invention of the transistor in 1947 by William B. Shockley and his team at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s Bell Laboratories. They laid very thin paths of metal (usually aluminum or copper) directly on the same piece of material as their devices. These small paths acted as wires. With this technique an entire circuit could be “integrated” on a single piece of solid material and an integrated circuit (IC) thus created. ICs can contain hundreds of thousands of individual transistors on a single piece of material the size of a pea. Photo: An integrated circuit from the outside. This is what an IC looks like when it's conveniently packaged inside a flash memory chip. Inside the black protective case, there's a tiny integrated circuit, with millions of transistors capable of storing millions of binary digits of information.
An IC, a chip, or a microchip.