Integrated circuit (English: integrated circuit, abbreviated as IC), in electronics, is a circuit (mainly including semiconductor equipment, including passive components, etc.) that is concentrated on the surface of a semiconductor wafer miniaturization approach.

The aforementioned integrated circuits in which circuits are manufactured on the surface of semiconductor chips are also called thin-film integrated circuits. Another type of thick-film integrated circuit (hybrid integrated circuit) is a miniaturized circuit composed of independent semiconductor devices and passive components integrated into a substrate or circuit board.

Integrated circuits have two main advantages over discrete transistors: cost and performance. The low cost is due to the fact that the chip has all its components printed as a unit via photolithography technology, rather than making just one transistor at a time.

High performance is due to components switching on and off quickly, consuming less energy because they are small and close to each other. In 2006, the chip area increased from a few square millimeters to 350 mm?, and each mm? could reach one million transistors.

Classification

There are many ways to classify integrated circuits. According to whether the circuit is analog or digital, it can be divided into: analog integrated circuits, digital integrated circuits and mixed-signal integrated circuits (analog and digital are in on a chip).

Digital integrated circuits can contain anything from thousands to millions of logic gates, flip-flops, multiplexers, and other circuits spread across a few square millimeters. The small size of these circuits allows for higher speeds, lower power consumption (see Low Power Design) and lower manufacturing costs compared to board-level integration.

These digital ICs, represented by microprocessors, digital signal processors and microcontrollers, use binary in their work to process 1 and 0 signals.

Analog integrated circuits, such as sensors, power control circuits and operational amplifiers, process analog signals. Complete the functions of amplification, filtering, demodulation, mixing, etc. By using analog integrated circuits designed by experts with good characteristics, the burden of circuit designers is relieved, and there is no need to start from the basic transistor design.