Also known as: IC, Microchip, Chip

An integrated circuit (IC, or chip) is a set of electronic circuits fabricated together on a single small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon.¹

Overview

Instead of wiring individual transistors, resistors, and other parts by hand, an IC etches them and their connections onto one die in a single manufacturing process. Independently invented by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce around 1958–1959, this packed whole circuits into a tiny, reliable, cheap chip. Successive process generations shrank the features and multiplied the transistor count — the trend captured by Moore’s law — until a single chip could hold billions of switches.

Where it fits

The integrated circuit is what made computers small and affordable: a CPU, memory, or an entire system-on-a-chip is one IC. The logic gates of digital design are built from the transistors inside it. In SDR hardware, ICs do everything from the analog-to-digital conversion in a dongle to the dedicated chips that handle wideband sampling before GopherTrunk’s software takes over.

Sources

1. Integrated circuit — Wikipedia, on ICs, their invention, and fabrication. ↩

See also

• Transistor
• Semiconductor
• Logic gate
• Moore's law
• Central processing unit (CPU)
• System on a chip (SoC)