The cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time.

ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits: cost and performance. These advances, roughly following Moore's law, make the computer chips of today possess millions of times the capacity and thousands of times the speed of the computer chips of the early 1970s. Since their origins in the 1960s, the size, speed, and capacity of chips have progressed enormously, driven by technical advances that fit more and more MOS transistors on chips of the same size – a modern chip may have many billions of MOS transistors in an area the size of a human fingernail. Very-large-scale integration was made practical by technological advancements in metal–oxide–silicon (MOS) semiconductor device fabrication. Computers, mobile phones and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs such as modern computer processors and microcontrollers. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. The IC's mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to integrated circuit design has ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors. This results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete electronic components. Large numbers of tiny MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors) integrate into a small chip. Virtual detail of an integrated circuit through four layers of planarized copper interconnect, down to the polysilicon (pink), wells (greyish), and substrate (green)Īn integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or 'chip') of semiconductor material, usually silicon.

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