ic chip precaution

Many ICs are static sensitive and can be damaged when you touch them because your body may have become charged with static electricity, from your clothes for example. Static sensitive ICs will be supplied in antistatic packaging with a warning label and they should be left in this packaging until you are ready to use them.

It is usually adequate to earth your hands by touching a metal water pipe or window frame before handling the IC but for the more sensitive (and expensive!) ICs special equipment is available, including earthed wrist straps and earthed work surfaces. You can make an earthed work surface with a sheet of aluminium kitchen foil and using a crocodile clip to connect the foil to a metal water pipe or window frame with a 10k resistor in series.

remove ic from its holder

1) gently prised out the holder with a small flat-blade scewdriver.

2)carefully lever up each end by inserting the screwdriver blade between the IC and its holder and gently twisting the screw

3)start lifting at both ends before you attempt to remove the IC, otherwise you will bend and possibly break the pins

ic chip identification

Identify the Serial Number

Find the serial number on the IC. It should be located on the top side of the chip, when the IC is standing on its metal pins. An example of a serial number would be: "74HC04." You may need to use a magnified glass in order to read the serial number.

Find the Data Sheet

Look up the serial number for the IC on the Google or Yahoo! search engine. There you should find a PDF document for download from the manufacturers website. Download the data sheet.

Information on the Data Sheet

Once identified you will be able to identify what each pin of the IC does, how it responds to different voltage levels, and how fast the IC able to respond to changing voltage levels.

function of ic (intergrated circuit)

The function of an IC (integrated circuit) chip is to replace many separate electronic components which could possibly have been used to build a particular electronic circuit. Most of those separate components are replaced by just one tiny IC chip that has been manufactured ("fabricated" is the correct technical word) to include extremely miniature circuits which imitate the behavior of all those separate components.

• There are many reasons why ICs are being used more and more. Here are just a few of them: 

• costs of manufacture: using an IC saves the labor of soldering together all the separate components to make the equivalent circuit 

• space: using an IC saves the huge amount of space that the circuit would take up if it were built using separate components 

• energy: using an IC saves a lot of electrical energy compared to the same circuit built using separate components 

• speed: using an IC makes the circuit work much faster than it could ever do if it were built using separate components.

An IC chip can include tens, hundreds, thousands or many millions of components. ICs are commonly used nowadays to build computers and many other types of electronic devices.

history of Integrated Circuit

By 1958 the transistor was in wide use, however it didn't take long for the limits of the transistor to be met and soon manufacturers were looking for something even more compact and efficient to use in newer electronics.

In 1958 and 1959, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Camera, came up with a solution to the problem of large numbers of components, and the integrated circuit was developed.

Instead of making transistors one-by-one, several transistors could be made at the same time, on the same piece of semiconductor. Not only transistors, but other electric components such as resistors, capacitors and diodes could be made by the same process with the same materials.

Originally it was thought that integrated circuits would be useful only in military applications, and many microprocessor investors pulled out before the work was completed. However time has proven the integrated circuit to be greatly undervalued.

Jack Kilby's Chip - the Monolithic Idea

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958.

In mid-1958, Kilby was a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments who did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers" and finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12 he presented his findings to the management, which included Mark Shepherd: he showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.

Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce came up with his own idea for the integrated circuit. He did it half a year later than Jack Kilby. Noyce's circuit solved several practical problems that Kilby's circuit had, mainly the problem of interconnecting all the components on the chip. This was done by adding the metal as a final layer and then removing some of it so that the wires needed to connect the components were formed. This made the integrated circuit more suitable for mass production. Besides being one of the early pioneers of the integrated circuit, Robert Noyce also was one of the co-founders of Intel. Intel is one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

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what is ic (intergrated circuit)

Another name for a chip, an integrated circuit (IC) is a small electronic device made out of a semiconductor material. The first integrated circuit was developed in the 1950s by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor.

intergrated circuit(ic)

Integrated circuits are used in virtually all electronic equipment today and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other digital home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the low cost of producing integrated circuits.
ICs can be made very compact, having up to several billion transistors and other electronic components in an area the size of a fingernail. The width of each conducting line in a circuit (the line width) can be made smaller and smaller as the technology advances, in 2008 it dropped below 100 nanometers and in 2013 it is expected to be in the teens of nanometers.

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