Sunday, February 8, 2009

IC Technolgy

Before we go in detail of IC technology first of all we have to understand what is IC,IC directly implies the Integrated Circuit.An IC,often called a chip,is a semiconductor device consisting of a set of connected transistors and other devices.Every processor must eventually implemented on an integrated circuit(IC).IC technology involves the manner in which we map a digital implementation onto an IC.A number of different processes exists to build semiconductor,the most popular of which is complementary metal oxide semi conductor(CMOS).IC technology is independent from processor technology that means any type of processor can be mapped to any type of IC technology.Now the main question that arises in front of us is what are the differences between the different IC technologies.

To understand the difference between different IC technologies we must first recognize that semiconductors consists of numerous layers.The bottom layers form the transistors.The middle layers form logic components.The top layers connect these components with wires.One way to create these layers is by depositing photo-sensitive chemicals on the chip surface and then shining light through masks to change region of the chemicals.Thus,the task of building the layers is actually one of designing appropriate masks.A set of masks is often called layout.

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