Интегралдық схемалар: Миниатюралық электрониканың негізі

Electronic circuit formed on a small, flat piece of semiconductor material

An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip, computer chip, or simply chip, is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, and televisions, to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted the field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality. Integrated circuits are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete components, allowing a large transistor count. The IC's mass production capability, reliability, and building block approach to integrated circuit design have ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now essential parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs such as modern computer processors and microcontrollers. Very large scale integration was made practical by technological advancements in semiconductor device fabrication. Since their origins in the 1960s, the size, speed, and capacity of chips have progressed enormously, driven by technical advances that fit more and more transistors on chips of the same size – a modern chip may have many billions of transistors in an area the size of a human fingernail. These advances, roughly following Moore's law, make the computer chips of today possess millions of times the capacity and thousands of times the speed of the computer chips of the early 1970s. ICs have three main advantages over circuits constructed out of discrete components: size, cost and performance. The size and cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time. Furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because the IC's components switch quickly and consume comparatively little power because of their small size and proximity. The main disadvantage of ICs is the high initial cost of designing them and the enormous capital cost of factory construction. This high initial cost means ICs are only commercially viable when high production volumes are anticipated.

An integrated circuit is defined as: A circuit in which all or some of the circuit elements are inseparably associated and electrically interconnected so that it is considered to be indivisible for the purposes of construction and commerce. In strict usage, integrated circuit refers to the single piece circuit construction originally known as a monolithic integrated circuit, built on a single piece of silicon. In general usage, circuits not meeting this strict definition are sometimes referred to as ICs, which are constructed using many different technologies, e. g. 3D IC, 2.5D IC, MCM, thin film transistors, thick film technologies, or hybrid integrated circuits. The choice of terminology frequently appears in discussions related to whether Moore's Law is obsolete.

An early attempt at combining several components in one device (like modern ICs) was the Loewe 3NF vacuum tube first made in 1926. Unlike ICs, it was designed with the purpose of tax avoidance, as in Germany, radio receivers had a tax that was levied depending on how many tube holders a radio receiver had. It allowed radio receivers to have a single tube holder. One million were manufactured, and were "a first step in integration of radioelectronic devices". The device contained an amplifier, composed of three triodes, two capacitors and four resistors in a six pin device. Early concepts of an integrated circuit go back to 1949, when German engineer Werner Jacobi (Siemens AG) filed a patent for an integrated circuit like semiconductor amplifying device showing five transistors on a common substrate in a three stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. Another early proponent of the concept was Geoffrey Dummer (1909–2002), a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D. C., on 7 May 1952. He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. Between 1953 and 1957, Sidney Darlington and Yasuo Tarui (Electrotechnical Laboratory) proposed similar chip designs where several transistors could share a common active area, but there was no electrical isolation to separate them from each other.

A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic substrates (so called micromodules), However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC. Newly employed by Texas Instruments, Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working example of an integrated circuit on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. However, Kilby's invention was not a true monolithic integrated circuit chip since it had external gold wire connections, which would have made it difficult to mass produce. Half a year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first true monolithic IC chip.

Transistor–transistor logic (TTL) was developed by James L. Buie in the early 1960s at TRW Inc. TTL became the dominant integrated circuit technology during the 1970s to early 1980s. Dozens of TTL integrated circuits were a standard method of construction for the processors of minicomputers and mainframe computers. Computers such as IBM 360 mainframes, PDP 11 minicomputers and the desktop Datapoint 2200 were built from bipolar integrated circuits, The MOSFET (also known as the MOS transistor), which was invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959, made it possible to build high density integrated circuits. In contrast to bipolar transistors which required a number of steps for the p–n junction isolation of transistors on a chip, MOSFETs required no such steps but could be easily isolated from each other. Its advantage for integrated circuits was pointed out by Dawon Kahng in 1961. The list of IEEE milestones includes the first integrated circuit by Kilby in 1958, Hoerni's planar process and Noyce's planar IC in 1959, and the MOSFET by Atalla and Kahng in 1959. The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated was a 16 transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS integrated circuit in 1964, a 120 transistor shift register developed by Robert Norman. Following the development of the self aligned gate (silicon gate) MOSFET by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon gate MOS IC technology with self aligned gates, the basis of all modern CMOS integrated circuits, was developed at Fairchild Semiconductor by Federico Faggin in 1968. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors, as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. This led to the inventions of the microprocessor and the microcontroller by the early 1970s. At first, MOS based computers only made sense when high density was required, such as aerospace and pocket calculators. Computers built entirely from TTL, such as the 1970 Datapoint 2200, were much faster and more powerful than single chip MOS microprocessors such as the 1972 Intel 8008 until the early 1980s. Advances in IC technology, primarily smaller features and larger chips, have allowed the number of MOS transistors in an integrated circuit to double every two years, a trend known as Moore's law. Moore originally stated it would double every year, but he went on to change the claim to every two years in 1975. This increased capacity has been used to decrease cost and increase functionality. In general, as the feature size shrinks, almost every aspect of an IC's operation improves. The cost per transistor and the switching power consumption per transistor goes down, while the memory capacity and speed go up, through the relationships defined by Dennard scaling (MOSFET scaling). Because speed, capacity, and power consumption gains are apparent to the end user, there is fierce competition among the manufacturers to use finer geometries. Over the years, transistor sizes have decreased from tens of microns in the early 1970s to 10 nanometers in 2017 with a corresponding million fold increase in transistors per unit area. As of 2016, typical chip areas range from a few square millimeters to around 600 mm2, with up to 25 million transistors per mm2. The expected shrinking of feature sizes and the needed progress in related areas was forecast for many years by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). The final ITRS was issued in 2016, and it is being replaced by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems. Initially, ICs were strictly electronic devices. The success of ICs has led to the integration of other technologies, in an attempt to obtain the same advantages of small size and low cost. These technologies include mechanical devices, optics, and sensors. Charge coupled devices, and the closely related active pixel sensors, are chips that are sensitive to light. They have largely replaced photographic film in scientific, medical, and consumer applications. Billions of these devices are now produced each year for applications such as cellphones, tablets, and digital cameras. This sub field of ICs won the Nobel Prize in 2009. Very small mechanical devices driven by electricity can be integrated onto chips, a technology known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). These devices were developed in the late 1980s and are used in a variety of commercial and military applications. Examples include DLP projectors, inkjet printers, and accelerometers and MEMS gyroscopes used to deploy automobile airbags. Since the early 2000s, the integration of optical functionality (optical computing) into silicon chips has been actively pursued in both academic research and in industry resulting in the successful commercialization of silicon based integrated optical transceivers combining optical devices (modulators, detectors, routing) with CMOS based electronics. Photonic integrated circuits that use light such as Lightelligence's PACE (Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine) also being developed, using the emerging field of physics known as photonics. Integrated circuits are also being developed for sensor applications in medical implants or other bioelectronic devices. Special sealing techniques have to be applied in such biogenic environments to avoid corrosion or biodegradation of the exposed semiconductor materials. as of 2018, the vast majority of all transistors are MOSFETs fabricated in a single layer on one side of a chip of silicon in a flat two dimensional planar process. Researchers have produced prototypes of several promising alternatives, such as:
various approaches to stacking several layers of transistors to make a three dimensional integrated circuit (3DIC), such as through silicon via, "monolithic 3D", stacked wire bonding, and other methodologies. transistors built from other materials: graphene transistors, molybdenite transistors, carbon nanotube field effect transistor, gallium nitride transistor, transistor like nanowire electronic devices, organic field effect transistor, etc. fabricating transistors over the entire surface of a small sphere of silicon. modifications to the substrate, typically to make "flexible transistors" for a flexible display or other flexible electronics, possibly leading to a roll away computer. As it becomes more difficult to manufacture ever smaller transistors, companies are using multi chip modules, three dimensional integrated circuits, package on package, High Bandwidth Memory and through silicon vias with die stacking to increase performance and reduce size, without having to reduce the size of the transistors. Such techniques are collectively known as advanced packaging. Advanced packaging is mainly divided into 2.5D and 3D packaging. 2.5D describes approaches such as multi chip modules while 3D describes approaches where dies are stacked in one way or another, such as package on package and high bandwidth memory. All approaches involve 2 or more dies in a single package. Alternatively, approaches such as 3D NAND stack multiple layers on a single die. A technique has been demonstrated to include microfluidic cooling on integrated circuits, to improve cooling performance as well as peltier thermoelectric coolers on solder bumps, or thermal solder bumps used exclusively for heat dissipation, used in flip chip.

The cost of designing and developing a complex integrated circuit is quite high, normally in the multiple tens of millions of dollars. Therefore, it only makes economic sense to produce integrated circuit products with high production volume, so the non recurring engineering (NRE) costs are spread across typically millions of production units. Modern semiconductor chips have billions of components, and are far too complex to be designed by hand. Software tools to help the designer are essential. Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems, including integrated circuits. The tools work together in a design flow that engineers use to design, verify, and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Some of the latest EDA tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to help engineers save time and improve chip performance.

The semiconductors of the periodic table of the chemical elements were identified as the most likely materials for a solid state vacuum tube. Starting with copper oxide, proceeding to germanium, then silicon, the materials were systematically studied in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, monocrystalline silicon is the main substrate used for ICs although some III V compounds of the periodic table such as gallium arsenide are used for specialized applications like LEDs, lasers, solar cells and the highest speed integrated circuits. It took decades to perfect methods of creating crystals with minimal defects in semiconducting materials' crystal structure. Semiconductor ICs are fabricated in a planar process which includes three key process steps photolithography, deposition (such as chemical vapor deposition), and etching. The main process steps are supplemented by doping and cleaning. More recent or high performance ICs may instead use multi gate FinFET or GAAFET transistors instead of planar ones, starting at the 22 nm node (Intel) or 16/14 nm nodes. Mono crystal silicon wafers are used in most applications (or for special applications, other semiconductors such as gallium arsenide are used). The wafer need not be entirely silicon. Photolithography is used to mark different areas of the substrate to be doped or to have polysilicon, insulators or metal (typically aluminium or copper) tracks deposited on them. Dopants are impurities intentionally introduced to a semiconductor to modulate its electronic properties. Doping is the process of adding dopants to a semiconductor material. Integrated circuits are composed of many overlapping layers, each defined by photolithography, and normally shown in different colors. Some layers mark where various dopants are diffused into the substrate (called diffusion layers), some define where additional ions are implanted (implant layers), some define the conductors (doped polysilicon or metal layers), and some define the connections between the conducting layers (via or contact layers). All components are constructed from a specific combination of these layers. In a self aligned CMOS process, a transistor is formed wherever the gate layer (polysilicon or metal) crosses a diffusion layer (this is called "the self aligned gate"). Capacitive structures, in form very much like the parallel conducting plates of a traditional electrical capacitor, are formed according to the area of the "plates", with insulating material between the plates. Capacitors of a wide range of sizes are common on ICs. Meandering stripes of varying lengths are sometimes used to form on chip resistors, though most logic circuits do not need any resistors. The ratio of the length of the resistive structure to its width, combined with its sheet resistivity, determines the resistance. More rarely, inductive structures can be built as tiny on chip coils, or simulated by gyrators. Since a CMOS device only draws current on the transition between logic states, CMOS devices consume much less current than bipolar junction transistor devices. A random access memory is the most regular type of integrated circuit; the highest density devices are thus memories; but even a microprocessor will have memory on the chip. (See the regular array structure at the bottom of the first image.) Although the structures are intricate – with widths which have been shrinking for decades – the layers remain much thinner than the device widths. The layers of material are fabricated much like a photographic process, although light waves in the visible spectrum cannot be used to "expose" a layer of material, as they would be too large for the features. Thus photons of higher frequencies (typically ultraviolet) are used to create the patterns for each layer. Because each feature is so small, electron microscopes are essential tools for a process engineer who might be debugging a fabrication process. Each device is tested before packaging using automated test equipment (ATE), in a process known as wafer testing, or wafer probing. The wafer is then cut into rectangular blocks, each of which is called a die. Each good die (plural dice, dies, or die) is then connected into a package using aluminium (or gold) bond wires which are thermosonically bonded to pads, usually found around the edge of the die. Thermosonic bonding was first introduced by A. Coucoulas which provided a reliable means of forming these vital electrical connections to the outside world. After packaging, the devices go through final testing on the same or similar ATE used during wafer probing. Industrial CT scanning can also be used. Test cost can account for over 25% of the cost of fabrication on lower cost products, but can be negligible on low yielding, larger, or higher cost devices. as of 2022, a fabrication facility (commonly known as a semiconductor fab) can cost over US$12 billion to construct. The cost of a fabrication facility rises over time because of increased complexity of new products; this is known as Rock's law. Such a facility features:
The wafers up to 300 mm in diameter (wider than a common dinner plate). as of 2022, 5 nm transistors. Copper interconnects where copper wiring replaces aluminum for interconnects. Low κ dielectric insulators. Silicon on insulator (SOI). Strained silicon in a process used by IBM known as Strained silicon directly on insulator (SSDOI). Multigate devices such as tri gate transistors. ICs can be manufactured either in house by integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) or using the foundry model. IDMs are vertically integrated companies (like Intel and Samsung) that design, manufacture and sell their own ICs, and may offer design and/or manufacturing (foundry) services to other companies (the latter often to fabless companies). In the foundry model, fabless companies (like Nvidia) only design and sell ICs and outsource all manufacturing to pure play foundries such as TSMC. These foundries may offer IC design services.

The earliest integrated circuits were packaged in ceramic flat packs, which continued to be used by the military for their reliability and small size for many years. Commercial circuit packaging quickly moved to the dual in line package (DIP), first in ceramic and later in plastic, which is commonly cresol formaldehyde novolac. In the 1980s pin counts of VLSI circuits exceeded the practical limit for DIP packaging, leading to pin grid array (PGA) and leadless chip carrier (LCC) packages. Surface mount packaging appeared in the early 1980s and became popular in the late 1980s, using finer lead pitch with leads formed as either gull wing or J lead, as exemplified by the small outline integrated circuit (SOIC) package – a carrier which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent DIP and is typically 70% thinner. This package has "gull wing" leads protruding from the two long sides and a lead spacing of 0.050 inches. In the late 1990s, plastic quad flat pack (PQFP) and thin small outline package (TSOP) packages became the most common for high pin count devices, though PGA packages are still used for high end microprocessors. Ball grid array (BGA) packages have existed since the 1970s. Flip chip Ball Grid Array packages, which allow for a much higher pin count than other package types, were developed in the 1990s. In an FCBGA package, the die is mounted upside down (flipped) and connects to the package balls via a package substrate that is similar to a printed circuit board rather than by wires. FCBGA packages allow an array of input output signals (called Area I/O) to be distributed over the entire die rather than being confined to the die periphery. BGA devices have the advantage of not needing a dedicated socket but are much harder to replace in case of device failure. Intel transitioned away from PGA to land grid array (LGA) and BGA beginning in 2004, with the last PGA socket released in 2014 for mobile platforms. as of 2018, AMD uses PGA packages on mainstream desktop processors, BGA packages on mobile processors, and high end desktop and server microprocessors use LGA packages. Electrical signals leaving the die must pass through the material electrically connecting the die to the package, through the conductive traces (paths) in the package, through the leads connecting the package to the conductive traces on the printed circuit board. The materials and structures used in the path these electrical signals must travel have very different electrical properties, compared to those that travel to different parts of the same die. As a result, they require special design techniques to ensure the signals are not corrupted, and much more electric power than signals confined to the die itself. When multiple dies are put in one package, the result is a system in package, abbreviated SiP (System in Package). A multi chip module (MCM (multi chip module)), is created by combining multiple dies on a small substrate often made of ceramic. The distinction between a large MCM and a small printed circuit board is sometimes fuzzy. Packaged integrated circuits are usually large enough to include identifying information. Four common sections are the manufacturer's name or logo, the part number, a part production batch number and serial number, and a four digit date code to identify when the chip was manufactured. Extremely small surface mount technology parts often bear only a number used in a manufacturer's lookup table to find the integrated circuit's characteristics. The manufacturing date is commonly represented as a two digit year followed by a two digit week code, such that a part bearing the code 8341 was manufactured in week 41 of 1983, or approximately in October 1983.

The possibility of copying by photographing each layer of an integrated circuit and preparing photomasks for its production on the basis of the photographs obtained is a reason for the introduction of legislation for the protection of layout designs. The US Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 established intellectual property protection for photomasks used to produce integrated circuits. A diplomatic conference held at Washington, D. C., in 1989 adopted a Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits, also called the Washington Treaty or IPIC Treaty. The treaty is currently not in force, but was partially integrated into the TRIPS agreement. There are several United States patents connected to the integrated circuit, which include patents by J. S. Kilby , , and by R. F. Stewart
National laws protecting IC layout designs have been adopted in a number of countries, including Japan, the EC, the UK, Australia, and Korea. The UK enacted the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, c. 48, § 213, after it initially took the position that its copyright law fully protected chip topographies. See British Leyland Motor Corp. v. Armstrong Patents Co. Criticisms of inadequacy of the UK copyright approach as perceived by the US chip industry are summarized in further chip rights developments. Australia passed the Circuit Layouts Act of 1989 as a sui generis form of chip protection. Korea passed the Act Concerning the Layout Design of Semiconductor Integrated Circuits in 1992.

The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Early digital circuits containing tens of transistors provided a few logic gates, and early linear ICs such as the Plessey SL201 or the Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. The number of transistors in an integrated circuit has increased dramatically since then. The term "large scale integration" (LSI) was first used by IBM scientist Rolf Landauer when describing the theoretical concept; that term gave rise to the terms "small scale integration" (SSI), "medium scale integration" (MSI), "very large scale integration" (VLSI), and "ultra large scale integration" (ULSI). The early integrated circuits were SSI. SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and aerospace projects helped inspire development of the technology. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. Although the Apollo Guidance Computer led and motivated integrated circuit technology, it was the Minuteman missile that forced it into mass production. The Minuteman missile program and various other United States Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U. S. Government spending on space and defense still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U. S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow IC firms to penetrate the industrial market and eventually the consumer market. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968. Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the 1970s decade. A typical application was FM inter carrier sound processing in television receivers. The first application MOS chips were small scale integration (SSI) chips. the earliest experimental MOS chip to be fabricated was a 16 transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. The same year, General Microelectronics introduced the first commercial MOS integrated circuit chip, consisting of 120 p channel MOS transistors. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law, leading to chips with hundreds of MOSFETs on a chip by the late 1960s. The masks used to process and manufacture SSI, MSI and early LSI and VLSI devices (such as the microprocessors of the early 1970s) were mostly created by hand, often using Rubylith tape or similar. For large or complex ICs (such as memories or processors), this was often done by specially hired professionals in charge of circuit layout, placed under the supervision of a team of engineers, who would also, along with the circuit designers, inspect and verify the correctness and completeness of each mask. Integrated circuits such as 1K bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4,000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10,000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second generation microprocessors.

"Very large scale integration" (VLSI) is a development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and, as of 2023, transistor counts continue to grow beyond 5.3 trillion transistors per chip. Multiple developments were required to achieve this increased density. Manufacturers moved to smaller MOSFET design rules and cleaner fabrication facilities. The path of process improvements was summarized by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which has since been succeeded by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS). Electronic design tools improved, making it practical to finish designs in a reasonable time. The more energy efficient CMOS replaced NMOS and PMOS, avoiding a prohibitive increase in power consumption. The complexity and density of modern VLSI devices made it no longer feasible to check the masks or do the original design by hand. Instead, engineers use EDA (Electronic design automation) tools to perform most functional verification work. In 1986, one megabit random access memory (RAM) chips were introduced, containing more than one million transistors. Microprocessor chips passed the million transistor mark in 1989, and the billion transistor mark in 2005. The trend continues largely unabated, with chips introduced in 2007 containing tens of billions of memory transistors.

To allow identification during production, most silicon chips will have a serial number in one corner. It is also common to add the manufacturer's logo. Ever since ICs were created, some chip designers have used the silicon surface area for surreptitious, non functional images or words. These are sometimes referred to as chip art, silicon art, silicon graffiti or silicon doodling.