Electronic devices – including
computers, portable stereos, calculators, microwave ovens or cookers and
digital watches – are all around us, making modern life more convenient. In
spite of their many differences, these devices all rely on the same invention –
the integrated circuit (IC), also known as the micro chip – which can
calculate, process, send, receive and store information faster, more cheaply
and more accurately than any other machine ever made.
A microchip or IC is a collection
of thousands of electrical circuits, all of them tiny and laid out on wafers of
silicon about the size of a fingernail. Information enters as pulses of
electric current. These chase along the pathways of the circuit, picking up
other pieces of information, changing it, working on it, keeping some bits and
rejecting others, and producing a new set of information at the other end
within a flash of time.
The speed and the potentiality of
a microchip or IC are really amazing. For example, predicting the world’s
weather condition is a complex business. The computer of the British
Meteorological office can make up to 80 billion calculations in a second,
although it usually operates at 1 billion calculations a second. A six-day
global weather forecast takes it about 15 minutes to work out.
The smallest IC of the world is
called a Tiny mite. It is surrounded
by its electrical connectors and total microchip is designed on its panel is
the size of a human fingernail.
As we know, the computers are
digital machines, chiefly working on integrated circuits. The means of storing
and processing all information like words, music, pictures and sounds – as long
strings of numbers, or codes. Computer programmes, also known as software, tell
a computer how to process its information by breaking down every task into a
series of simple steps. These are carried out at amazing speeds. Some home
computers or personal computers can deal with 400 million codes per second;
bigger machines are considerably faster than this.
These microchips are applied in
various activities of our lives, particularly where human eye failed to judge.
For instance, some tennis players can serve a ball at 200 km/h, which is too
fast for the eye to follow the ball clearly.
In professional matches, linesmen and umpires rely on an electronic eye to tell them if a service
of the ball has crossed a line or not. The system sends an infrared beam along
the service line, about 15mm above the ground. If the service of the ball
crosses the beam; a microchip activates a warning beeper and a red light in the
lineman’s box.
Thus microchip or IC has become
an indispensable object, which continuously making our lives more easily and
more efficient than ever before.
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