Full Form of IC:
Integrated Circuit
IC Full Form is Integrated Circuit. An electronics circuits’ set present on a semiconductor chip, like a silicon chip, is called an IC or an Integrated Circuit. When compared to a circuit made using independent components of electronics, the size of an IC is quite small. Hence, they can be manufactured to have a very compact size, and can contain more than a million electronic components like transistors. As the technology gets more advanced, every conducting line’s width in a circuit decreases. This width was below a hundred nanometers in the year 2008. It further dropped to fourteen nanometers in the year 2014.
Numerous experiments were performed to show that the functions of the vacuum tubes can be performed by the semiconductor devices also. These experiments made the designing of ICs possible. The advancements made in the fabrication of the semiconductor devices further helped in the development of integrated circuits. A significant improvement consisted of integrating multiple transistors of very small size into a tiny chip. The ICs were adopted rapidly and replaced the designs that used discrete transistors due to many reasons. These reasons include the building block approach of ICs in designing of circuits, reliability and capability of mass production.
The two main factors of ICs which make them preferable over the discrete circuits include performance and cost. The process known as photolithography is used for printing the chips and their components. This reduces their cost greatly. The number of materials used for making ICs is very low as compared to discrete circuits, which further reduces its cost. Since the components of an IC use a little amount of power, their performance is usually high. They consume less power because they have a small size, and they are situated closely with the chip’s other components.