Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit is a semiconductor device containing interconnected electronic components fabricated on a single piece of material, usually silicon. It can implement functions ranging from simple switching to complex computation.

Transistor: A semiconductor device that controls current or voltage and can act as a switch or amplifier. Transistors are the active devices from which most modern integrated circuits are built.
Logic gate: A circuit that performs a Boolean operation on one or more binary inputs. Logic gates combine transistor states into the operations of digital chips.
Jack Kilby: An American electrical engineer who demonstrated a working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958. Kilby built an early working circuit with multiple components formed in one semiconductor piece.
Microprocessor: An integrated circuit that executes instructions and performs the central processing functions of a computer. Microprocessors place a computer's general-purpose processing engine on a chip.
Discrete component: An individual electronic component manufactured and used separately rather than as part of an integrated circuit. Discrete components perform similar functions but are assembled individually instead of fabricated together.
Doping (semiconductor): The intentional addition of impurities to a semiconductor to change its electrical properties. Doped regions create the junctions and conductive paths used in integrated circuits.
Very-large-scale integration: The integration of very large numbers of electronic components onto a single chip. It describes the density that lets one integrated circuit contain whole computing systems.
Robert Noyce: An American physicist and entrepreneur who developed a practical planar integrated-circuit approach. Noyce's use of planar silicon processing enabled interconnected components on a single chip.
Microcontroller: A compact integrated circuit combining a processor core with memory and peripheral interfaces for control tasks. Microcontrollers integrate the computing and interfaces needed to control embedded devices.
Vacuum tube: An electronic device that controls current through electron flow in an evacuated or gas-filled enclosure. Vacuum tubes performed amplification and switching before semiconductor chips became dominant.

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