About Chips

After the invention and mass production of the transistor, various solid-state semiconductor components, such as diodes and transistors, were widely used, replacing the functions and roles of vacuum tubes in circuits. In the middle and late 20th century, the progress of semiconductor manufacturing technology made integrated circuits possible. Compared with manual assembly of circuits using individual discrete electronic components, integrated circuits can integrate a large number of micro crystal tubes into a small chip, which is a great progress. The large-scale production capacity, reliability of integrated circuits and the modular method of circuit design ensure that standardized integrated circuits are quickly adopted instead of discrete transistors in design.

Integrated circuits have two main advantages over discrete transistors: cost and performance. The low cost is due to the fact that all components of the chip are printed as a unit by photolithography, instead of making only one transistor at a time. The high performance is due to the fast switching of components, which consumes less energy, because the components are small and close to each other. In 2006, the chip area increased from a few square millimeters to 350 mm ²， Per mm ² It can reach one million transistors.

The first integrated circuit prototype was completed by Jack Kilby in 1958, which included a bipolar transistor, three resistors and a capacitor.