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The Roll of Integrated Circuits in Today’s World – Hardware

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Integrated circuits originated in the 1940’s and 50’s, but were much larger and had the fraction of the power they do today. Nothing we know of would be the same if there were no microchips, digital signal processing chips, or semiconductor circuits. They are built in to almost every appliance there is, and the small scale of these chips has enabled smaller and smaller devices to exist. For example, cell phones that hold enormous amounts of information and even provide access to the Internet operate on very small circuits designed to fit in their small dimensions.

Circuits are found in almost everything, in addition to cell phones. Regular telephones, printers, microwave ovens, radios and even televisions include sophisticated circuitry. The ICs themselves are manufactured by companies that specialize in the advanced technologies that go into making them. Manufacturers of televisions or computers, for example, can order circuits according to the memory they support or the speed or bandwidth a device can achieve by using them.

Another important specification is the package type, such as the ball grid array, that is defined by the size of the chip and how it connects to the circuit board. The connection is usually dependent on the number of connecting pins the IC has built in. A circuit chip can be a microprocessor that controls an entire computer system, or a tiny device that has a specific purpose, such as managing the timing of signals. Something like this is called an application specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. There are some of these that are measured in millimeters they are so small.

Without the IC in the form that it is in today, many technologies wouldn’t exist, such as HDTV’s. It is only the processing power of these chips that enable such high resolution. The Internet, with its high speed and density of information, would not be the worldwide information source it is without the proper circuitry in the devices that store data and drive interconnected networks.

Predicting the Power of Future Electronics – Hardware

Since the integrated circuit was invented in the mid 20th century, various theories have been thought up to predict how powerful a circuit and related electronics can get. The most popular of these is Moore’s Law, named for the co-founder of Intel Gordon E. Moore, that predicts the number of transistors placed on a circuit will double every couple of years.

First described in 1965, this concept has still held its ground with the rapid development of new computing technologies. Limitations have been predicted for years, however the rule should hold for at least another decade, according to experts including Moore himself. Transistors have consistently gotten smaller, and it is thought that they can probably do so until they reach the size of molecules. Moore has even theorized that this might not be a limit if manufacturers decide to make circuits larger or develop multilayered designs.

Adding more transistors doesn’t necessary mean that processing power increases at the same rate. Processing speed can depend on various factors, so the public’s perception of Moore’s Law is often different than that of the manufacturing industry. The law was never intended to predict how fast performance would increase, however other experts have predicted a doubling in circuit performance every 18 months.

There are other theories related to the size, density and speed of components as well as cost. Most of them are somehow related to laws of transistor density. Other such rules dictate that power consumption of computer components doubles every year-and-a-half, while Kryder’s Law analyzes hard disk storage costs, per unit of information, and that increases in disk drive capacities are similar to rises in transistor count.

Similarly, it has been noted that RAM capacity increases at a rate comparable to processing power, while others have come up with rules for network capacity increases as well as cost per pixel increases related to digital cameras. These all could be based on observation or used for industry planning, so the real potential of how transistor count or any other statistic is not definitively known.

The Roll of Integrated Circuits in Today’s World – Hardware

Predicting the Power of Future Electronics – Hardware

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