IN OUR resent world we hear too much about ICs. What is an IC? In the modern world we are much more interested in digital world everything is digital technology based. In 1958, Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit flip-flop with two transistors at Texas Instruments.
In 2003, the Intel Pentium 4 microprocessor contained 55 million transistors and a 512-Mbit dynamic random access memory (DRAM) contained more than half a billion transistors. This corresponds to a compound annual growth rate of 53 per cent over 45 years. No other technology in history has sustained such a high growth rate for so long. This incredible growth has come from steady miniaturization of transistors and improvements in manufacturing processes. Most other fields of engineering involve tradeoffs between performance, power, and price. However, as transistors become smaller, they also become faster, dissipate less power, and are cheaper to manufacture.
This synergy has revolutionized not only electronics, but also society at large. Processing capability that was once necessary for secret military spread-spectrum communications is now available in disposable cellular telephones.
In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first functioning point contact transistor at Bell Laboratories, It was nearly classified as a military secret, but Bell Labs publicly announced the device in the following year. Ten years later, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments realized the potential for miniaturization if multiple transistors could be built on a single piece of silicon.
First prototype of an integrated circuit, constructed from a germanium slice and gold wires. Soon after inventing the point contact transistor, Bell Labs developed the bipolar junction transistor. Bipolar transistors were more reliable, less noisy, and more power-efficient. Early integrated circuits primarily used bipolar transistors.
Transistors can be viewed as electrically controlled switches with a control terminal and two other terminals that are connected or disconnected depending on the voltage applied to the control. Bipolar transistors require a small current into the control (base) terminal to switch much larger currents between the other two (emitter and collector) terminals. The quiescent power dissipated by these base currents limits the maximum number of transistors that can be integrated onto a single die. Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOS- FETs) offer the compelling advantage that they draw almost zero control current while idle.
The original idea of field effect transistors dated back to the German scientist Julius Lilienfield in 1925 and a structure closely resembling the MOSFET was proposed in 1935 by Oskar Heil but materials problems foiled early attempts to make functioning devices. Frank Wanlass at Fairchild described the first logic gates using MOSFETs in 1963. His gates used both nMOS and pMOS transistors, earning the name Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, or CMOS. The circuits used discrete transistors but consumed only nanowatts of power, six orders of magnitude less than their bipolar counterparts.
Intel pioneered nMOS technology with its 1101 256-bit static random access memory and 4004 4-bit microprocessor While the nMOS process was less expensive than CMOS, nMOS logic gates still consumed power while idle.
As its fabrication is so difficult for developing countries like Pakistan but it is much more interesting how our daily use electronics goods are working more efficiently as compare to past and becoming too small. Miniaturization is only due to this integrated circuits commonly named as ICs in our daily routine.