Introduction
We are now going through a period of micro electronic circuits.Micro electronics refers to the circuit technology that is capable of producing circuits that contain millions of components in a small piece of silicon(known as silicon chip)whose area is in the order of 100sq.mm.The integrated circuits or IC is a miniature, low cost electronic circuit consisting of active and passive components that are inseparably joined together on a single crystal chip of silicon.These circuits offer a number of distinct advantages over those made by the interconnecting discrete components.
Advantages
- Miniaturization and hence increased equipment density
- Cost reduction due to batch production
- Increased system reliability due to elimination of soldered joints
- Improved functional performance(as it is possible to fabricate even complex circuits for better characteristics)
- Matched devices
- Increased operating speeds
- Reduction in power consumption
Integrated circuits offers a wide range of application and are broadly classified as
1)Digital IC’s 2) Linear IC’s
Digital IC’s are complete functioning logic networks that are equivalents of basic transistor logic circuits.They are used to form such circuits as gates,counters,multiplexers,demultiplexers,shift registers etc
Digital circuits are primary concerned with only two levels of voltage ‘high’ and ‘low’ therefore,accurate control of operating region characteristics is not required in digital circuits,unlike in linear circuits.For this reason,digital circuits are easy to design and are produced in large quantities as low cost devices.
Linear ICs are equivalent to discrete transistor networks ,such as amplifiers,filters,frequency multipliers and modulators that often require additional external components of satisfactory operation.
Of all presently available linear ICs ,the majority are operational amplifiers(op-amp).Op-amps are further classified into two groups:general purpose and special purpose.General purpose op-amps may be used for a variety of applications such as integrator,differentiator,summing amplifier etc.A special purpose op-amp is used for the specific operations they are designed for eg:LM380 op-amp can be used only for audio power applications.
Written by arjun on September 26th, 2008 with
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