Integrated circuitAn integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of miniaturized transistors and other electronic components are integrated together on the chip. This results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete components, allowing a large transistor count.
Mixed-signal integrated circuitA mixed-signal integrated circuit is any integrated circuit that has both analog circuits and digital circuits on a single semiconductor die. Their usage has grown dramatically with the increased use of cell phones, telecommunications, portable electronics, and automobiles with electronics and digital sensors. Integrated circuits (ICs) are generally classified as digital (e.g. a microprocessor) or analog (e.g. an operational amplifier). Mixed-signal ICs contain both digital and analog circuitry on the same chip, and sometimes embedded software.
Electronic circuitAn electronic circuit is composed of individual electronic components, such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductors and diodes, connected by conductive wires or traces through which electric current can flow. It is a type of electrical circuit and to be referred to as electronic, rather than electrical, generally at least one active component must be present. The combination of components and wires allows various simple and complex operations to be performed: signals can be amplified, computations can be performed, and data can be moved from one place to another.
Digital electronicsDigital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals. Digital electronic circuits are usually made from large assemblies of logic gates, often packaged in integrated circuits. Complex devices may have simple electronic representations of Boolean logic functions. The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (published in 1705) and he also established that by using the binary system, the principles of arithmetic and logic could be joined.
Low-power electronicsLow-power electronics are electronics, such as notebook processors, that have been designed to use less electric power than usual, often at some expense. In the case of notebook processors, this expense is processing power; notebook processors usually consume less power than their desktop counterparts, at the expense of lower processing power. watch The earliest attempts to reduce the amount of power required by an electronic device were related to the development of the wristwatch.
Integrated circuit designIntegrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography. IC design can be divided into the broad categories of digital and analog IC design. Digital IC design is to produce components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, memories (RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs.
Linear integrated circuitA linear integrated circuit or analog chip is a set of miniature electronic analog circuits formed on a single piece of semiconductor material. The voltage and current at specified points in the circuits of analog chips vary continuously over time. In contrast, digital chips only assign meaning to voltages or currents at discrete levels. In addition to transistors, analog chips often include a larger number of passive elements (capacitors, resistors, and inductors) than digital chips.
Application-specific integrated circuitAn application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ˈeɪsɪk) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
Computer performanceIn computing, computer performance is the amount of useful work accomplished by a computer system. Outside of specific contexts, computer performance is estimated in terms of accuracy, efficiency and speed of executing computer program instructions. When it comes to high computer performance, one or more of the following factors might be involved: Short response time for a given piece of work. High throughput (rate of processing work). Low utilization of computing resource(s). Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression.
Integrated circuit layoutIn integrated circuit design, integrated circuit (IC) layout, also known IC mask layout or mask design, is the representation of an integrated circuit in terms of planar geometric shapes which correspond to the patterns of metal, oxide, or semiconductor layers that make up the components of the integrated circuit. Originally the overall process was called tapeout, as historically early ICs used graphical black crepe tape on mylar media for photo imaging (erroneously believed to reference magnetic data—the photo process greatly predated magnetic media).
Digital-to-analog converterIn electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function. There are several DAC architectures; the suitability of a DAC for a particular application is determined by figures of merit including: resolution, maximum sampling frequency and others. Digital-to-analog conversion can degrade a signal, so a DAC should be specified that has insignificant errors in terms of the application.
CMOSComplementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", siːmɑːs, -ɒs) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFETs for logic functions. CMOS technology is used for constructing integrated circuit (IC) chips, including microprocessors, microcontrollers, memory chips (including CMOS BIOS), and other digital logic circuits.
Equivalent circuitIn electrical engineering, an equivalent circuit refers to a theoretical circuit that retains all of the electrical characteristics of a given circuit. Often, an equivalent circuit is sought that simplifies calculation, and more broadly, that is a simplest form of a more complex circuit in order to aid analysis. In its most common form, an equivalent circuit is made up of linear, passive elements. However, more complex equivalent circuits are used that approximate the nonlinear behavior of the original circuit as well.
XilinxXilinx, Inc. (ˈzaɪlɪŋks ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the first fabless manufacturing model. Xilinx was co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in the year 1984 and the company went public on the NASDAQ in the year 1990.
Boolean circuitIn computational complexity theory and circuit complexity, a Boolean circuit is a mathematical model for combinational digital logic circuits. A formal language can be decided by a family of Boolean circuits, one circuit for each possible input length. Boolean circuits are defined in terms of the logic gates they contain. For example, a circuit might contain binary AND and OR gates and unary NOT gates, or be entirely described by binary NAND gates. Each gate corresponds to some Boolean function that takes a fixed number of bits as input and outputs a single bit.
Power managementPower management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power state when inactive. In computing this is known as PC power management and is built around a standard called ACPI, this supersedes APM. All recent computers have ACPI support.
Subthreshold conductionSubthreshold conduction or subthreshold leakage or subthreshold drain current is the current between the source and drain of a MOSFET when the transistor is in subthreshold region, or weak-inversion region, that is, for gate-to-source voltages below the threshold voltage. The amount of subthreshold conduction in a transistor is set by its threshold voltage, which is the minimum gate voltage required to switch the device between on and off states.
PowerPCPowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
System on a chipA system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ,ˈɛsoʊsiː; pl. SoCs ,ˈɛsoʊsiːz) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include on-chip central processing unit (CPU), memory interfaces, input/output devices, input/output interfaces, and secondary storage interfaces, often alongside other components such as radio modems and a graphics processing unit (GPU) – all on a single substrate or microchip.
Circuit designThe process of circuit design can cover systems ranging from complex electronic systems down to the individual transistors within an integrated circuit. One person can often do the design process without needing a planned or structured design process for simple circuits. Still, teams of designers following a systematic approach with intelligently guided computer simulation are becoming increasingly common for more complex designs.
