microchipMicrochip technology is referred to as extremely integrated circuits. An integrated circuit / IC / Chip / microchip is an electronic circuit developed on a thin semiconductor material. It consists of semiconductor devices and passive components (resistors, capacitors, diodes). Before the evolution of integrated circuits there were vacuum tubes and discrete components based circuits. Vacuum assembly of vacuum tubes and costs were one of the biggest issues. Integrated circuits solved the problems with improved performance. Lower cost, improved performance, and feasible assembly or integration made microchip technology very popular in embedded systems and industrial applications.

A large number of transistors are developed at a time and integrated on printed circuit boards. This not only reduces cost but also decrease size and power. Now the ICs or microchips can contain millions of integrated devices. Moreover designing a single microchip costs a lot. Therefore a huge amount of ICs is developed at industry level that reduces a fair amount of cost.

MICROCHIP Categories

Microchips are categorized as:

• Digital integrated circuits or microchips
• Analogue integrated circuits or microchips

Digital integrated circuits

Digital Integrated Circuits are based on digital electronics. It is integrated with hundred to millions of digital components such as flip-flops, latches, multipliers and other such components. The analogue integrated circuits use analogue electronics and so perform only analogue operations. Such operations include filtering, demodulation, amplification, etc.

Analogue integrated circuits

Analogue integrated circuits are relatively quite critical to develop. Mostly the analogue ICs are available that can be used in circuits. This relieves the overhead of developing those analogue ICs from scratch. Digital ICs on the other hand are cost effective, smaller size, higher performance and low power dissipation. When digital and analogue signals are to be used on the same chip, mixed signal integrated circuits are developed.

MICROCHIP Advancements

The first integrated circuit was developed in 1959 since then the advancements are being made to improve it more and more. In fact the number of transistors within an integrated circuit gets double every two years.

Small Scale Integration (SSI)

The first integrated circuit contained very few (10-12) integrated transistors and known as SSI - small-scale integration. Apollo Guided Computers were the early famous implementation of SSI.

MSI and LSI

In 1960 the number of integrated transistor increased to hundreds. These ICs were categorized as MSI – medium scale integration. In mid 1970s the number of integrated transistors reached to tens of thousands that resulted in LSI – large-scale integration.

VLSI – Very Large Scale Integration

The VLSI technology came into existence in 1980s and still getting advancements. VLSI allows millions of transistor integration on a single chip. VLSI technology is based on CMOS technology and this what that makes possible the microchips. CPU, FLASH and a large number of complex embedded systems are based on VLSI. System on chip is an advancement of VLSI as individual chips are integrated and connected on PCB – printed circuit boards. The PCB contains a whole electronic system such as microchip memories, processors, controllers, I / O interfaces, A / D converters (ADCs), and other electronic components.

Programmable Integrated Circuits

One field of integrated circuits is "programmable integrated circuits". These circuits are flexible enough to be programmed by user according his/her requirement. The user can program the logical functions and their connectivity. This allows the user to get desired IC functionality. For example a PIC can be programmed to work as adder or the same IC reprogrammed to work as any logic gate. One used programmable IC is FPGA that can implement thousand of integrated circuits.