Eli5 How do integrated circuits work?
In: Technology
Same way normal circuits work
An IC is just a nice compact package that you can place. It could contain just two transistors, or an opamp made of a hundred, or a crystal with supporting parts, or billions of transistors in a processor or memory module
Medium scale integration parts like OpAmps are nice because they clean up a design. You could hand build an OpAmp from discrete parts but you’d have dozens of transistors, resistors, and capacitors sprinkled around. None would need to be very big to do their job but they end up large so you can handle them. By putting them all together inside a little plastic housing you can put down just a single part for a complex function instead of having to build it all by hand each time
Large scale and very large scale integration parts(memory units and processors) are impractical to make by hand so an Integrated circuit is a necessity
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