Integrated Circuits - Electronics Basics #2

INTRODUCTION-

           
   Integrated circuits (ICs) are an important element in modern electronics. ICs are the heart of many boards and circuits. they are small black chips you can find on just every circuit board.if you are in electronics field whether hobbyist, engineer, or student you will need to use ICs in your projects so it's important to understand the concepts of Integrated Circuits clearly.

An 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, normally silicon.

Contents of this tutorial -

•  What's inside the IC
•  Different IC packages
•  Common ICs

what's inside the IC -

      when you think about IC. a black box may appear in your mind. but, have you ever think about what would be there inside that black box. lets see

   

inside the ic

in the above picture, you can see the inside view of an IC after removing the top.it consists of a number of tiny components like resistors, capacitors, transistors etc. this is known as integration.there are different methods of integration depending on a number of components inside that IC. they are listed as follows.

• SSI(Small Scale Integration)
• MSI(Medium Scale Integration)
• LSI(Large Scale Integration)
• VLSI(Very Large Scale Integration)

IC Packages -

      Integrated Circuits are available in different packages. the following picture shows different packages of ICs.

these are the different packages of ICs 

Polarity and Pin Numbering of ICs -

   Now let's see the pin numbering and polarities of an IC,i.e. how to identify the pin numbers. 

 Pin Numbering of IC starts from the down side of the notch or a Dot.following picture shows the pin numbering of IC. 

PIN NUMBERING OF DIP PACKAGE

  The above figure shows the pin numbering of a dual in-line package (DIP).once you know the first pin other pins are counted sequentially counter clockwise.

Common ICs -

        ICs are available in a number of forms. but we cant cover everything, but we can see some common ICs,

1.Microprocessors And MIcrocontrollers -

    there are number of Microcontrollers available in the market such as 8051 family microcontrollers, AVR microcontrollers, PIC microcontrollers and most famous ATMEGA microcontrollers by ATMEL which is used in Arduino.

    the following picture shows the ATMEGA 328 Microcontroller IC in DIP package and TQFP package.

ATMEGA 328 (DIP)

ATMEGA 328(TQFP)

2.Timer ICs -

      Timer ICs are one of the ICs that are commonly used.they are available in dual in-line package (DIP) and Surface Mounting Package(SMD). following Picture Shows the generally used timer IC that is 555 Timer and 556 Timer.

555 Timer IC(DIP)

556 Timer IC(DIP)

555 timer (SMD)

 you can get more details about ICs as you learn forward, as you will start building projects, you will need to use various IC in different packages.

I hope this post would be helpful for you, please share your views with me by means of comment, stay tuned for more such posts, have a good day, see you soon.