Solid State Electronic Devices, 7th Edition

9.1 Background

In this section we provide an overview of the nature of integrated circuits and the motivation for using them. It is important to realize the reasons, both technical and economic, for the dramatic rise of ICs to their present role in electronics. We shall discuss several main types of ICs and point out some of the applications of each. More specific fabrication techniques will be presented in later sections.

9.1.1 Advantages of Integration

It might appear that building complicated circuits, involving many interconnected components on a single Si substrate, would be risky both technically and economically. In fact, however, modern techniques allow this to be done reliably and relatively inexpensively; in most cases an entire circuit ...