Integrated circuits

Integrated Circuits are silicon semi-conductor chips that contains various components such as transistors, diodes, registers and capacitors. These components are interconnected with each other inside the IC chip to form an electronic circuit. The chip is mounted in an metal or plastic package. This package can be of two types namely,

• Dual-Inline package
• Flat package

The dual-inline package is the most widely used IC packages due to it's cheaper cost and easy installation than the Flat package. The IC packages contains number of logic gates and depending on the number of logic gates used in the IC packages , it can be divided into,

Small Scale Integration (SSI) :  Containing less than or equal to 12 logic gates

Medium Scale Integration (MSI) ; Containing 10 to 100 logic gates

Large Scale Integration (LSI) : Containing more than  100 logic gates

Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) : Containing gates in the range of  1000's

Integrated Circuits have various advantages, such as

• Low cost and economic to use
• High Operating Speed
• Reliable
• Reduces number of external wiring
• Reduces power consumptions