Circuits integrated

An integrated circuit (IC), or chip, represents the brains behind all electronic devices. An IC is a compilation of billions of complex subunits such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and diodes that are all interconnected in a specific manner depending on the desired application. Incredibly, this minute world of microcircuitry is fitted onto the surface of a thin silicon substrate about the size of a fingernail Though ICs have only been used since the early 1970s, consider some of the ways our lives have been changed  

Lightweight laptop computers are easily taken with us while traveling  

Cars monitor their emissions and adjust engine conditions for maximum gasoline efficiency  

Doctors are able to operate on patients from remote locations  

Answers to virtually all questions we may pose are available within minutes via the Internet  

Meanwhile, the price of transistors had fallen sharply as they started to become more widely used in domestic applications, and this, coupled with the desire to produce more sophisticated instruments, led instrument manufacturers to start incorporating them into their new products. The principle advantage in doing this was that the new circuits could be built on a modular basis using printed circuit boards, allowing considerable savings in production costs and at the same 

It was, however, not until the late 1960s that valve circuits disappeared entirely from new analytical instruments when they finally did, they were replaced by solid state circuits utilising both transistors and ICs, as both came into widespread use for instrumentation at much the same point in time. By now, there had been a fundamental change of attitude on the part of the instrument manufacturers, who now started to look upon electronics as an integral and important part of the overall system, rather than simply an accessory to the mechanical or optical parts of the instrument. 

Televisions may be mounted on walls, with a clarity that rivals viewing through a window  

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Coldren L A and Corzine S W 1995 Diode Lasers and Photonic integrated Circuits (New York Wiley)... 

Because beryllium is relatively transparent to X-rays, ultra-thin Be-foil is finding use in X-ray lithography for reproduction of microminiature integrated circuits. 

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