Integrated circuits

Unit 5. INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Text A

INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Pretext exercises

Read the following words and expressions and try to guess their meaning.

Electronics, microchip, passive, components, integration, manual, discrete, photolithography, contain, term, economically, reflect, combination, vertically, horizontally, microwave, silicon.

Read the following words and notice their pronunciation.

Memorize the following words and expressions

5.3. Read the text.

INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

In electronics, an integrated circuit is a miniaturized electronic circuit consisting mainly of semiconductor devices, as well as passive components that have been manufactured on the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material. The integration of large numbers of tiny transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors into a small chip was an enormous improvement over the manual assembly of circuits using electronic components. The integrated circuit’s mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors.

There are two main advantages of ICs over discrete circuits: cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography and not constructed one transistor at a time. Furthermore, much less material is used to construct a circuit as a packaged IC die than as a discrete circuit. Performance is high since the components switch quickly and consume little power because the components are small and close together.

The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. The term “Small-Scale Integration” (SSI) was used to denote them. SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects in 1960s as Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their guidance systems.

The next step in the development of integrated circuits, taken in the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip called “Medium-Scale Integration” (MSI). They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices, they allowed more complex systems to be produced using smaller circuit boards, less assembly work and a number of other advantages.

Further development led to “Large-Scale Integration” (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.

The final step in the development process, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the present, was “Very Large-Scale Integration” (VLSI). To reflect further growth of complexity, the term ULSI that stands for “Ultra-Large-Scale Integration” was proposed for chips of complexity of more than 1 million transistors.

Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a system of building very large integrated circuits that uses an entire silicon wafer to produce a single “super-chip”. Through a combination of large size and reduced packaging, WSI could lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers.

A system-on-a-chip (SOC) is an integrated circuit in which all the components needed for a computer are included on a single chip. 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. Among the most advanced are the microprocessors or cores, which control everything from computers to cellular phones to digital microwave ovens.

Only half a century after their development was initiated, integrated circuits have become useful. That is, modern computing, communication, manufacturing and transport systems, including the Internet, all depend on the existence of integrated circuits.