Why was the invention of the integrated circuit an important milestone?

Answer 1

Integrated circuits are etched onto a silicon chip. All the elements of a complete circuit can be included on a small slice of silicon, including transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes. It takes several stages of a photographic and chemical process, to build up the design in a clean room to create a chip.

After the initial design, they can be mass produced at minimum material cost.

The chip is encapsulated in a small plastic box and legs sticking out, enabling it to be soldered onto a board with other chips and discrete components.

They are important to computers, as the miniturisation and complexity allows computers to be buit into a small enclosure at a reasonable price.

Answer 2

Before integrated circuits and transistors, computers consisted of massive assemblies of vacuum tubes. These tubes held charge to represent a 1 or a 0. Transistors allowed these tubes to be done away with. They are much smaller and can perform exceptionally faster. Integrated circuits bundle these transistors and other components into a single compact "chip". What once took up a whole room can now fit into a chip the size of your pinky nail. Actually, a chip the size of your pinky would be millions of times more powerful!

Without integrated circuits and the transistors they are made of, modern cell phones, PDAs, computers, laptops etc would not exist. It simply wouldn't be possible.

Answer 3

Integrated Circuits are made by fabricating millions of Transistors on a Silicon Chip. The size of Transistors fabricated on a single chip have played a big role in Development of Computers.

For example Pentium 4 processor in 2000 had 42 million transistors fabricated on 180 nanometer scale. While current Quad Core i7 Processor in 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors fabricated on 32 nanometer scale.

Answer 4

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