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

A chip is a package wrapped around a single sliver of silicon — the die. Zoom in and the whole circuit is there: logic and memory blocks plus millions or billions of transistors, all etched and wired together in one fabrication step. That integration is what made computers small, cheap, and reliable.

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)