The development of semiconductor devices is a miracle in the technical world
The development of semiconductor devices can be roughly divided into three stages. The fifties was a discrete component stage. The 1960s was the stage of integrated circuits, and the early 1970s was the stage of large-scale integrated circuits. At present, it is committed to the research of VLSI technology, which is an important technological development mark from the late 1970s to the 1980s.
The so-called integrated circuit is to make transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors and other components using planar technology on a semiconductor single wafer (usually a silicon wafer), and use special structures to isolate them electrically from each other, and then connect them to each other to form a In terms of scale. The micro-structure integrated circuit is divided into four types: small, medium, large, and super large. There is no strict boundary between them. Generally speaking, the scale below 100 components is small, and the scale from 100 to 1000 components is medium.
1000 to 10,000 components are large-scale, and more than tens of thousands of components can be called very large-scale. The development of computers is much earlier than that of semiconductors. Starting from mechanical computers, they have gone through the stage of tube computers. When transistors were born, they were quickly used by electronic computers. With the emergence of integrated circuits, the development of electronic computers has become even more powerful and has become more and more unusual: the performance is getting higher and faster, the speed is getting faster, the power consumption is getting less and less, and the size is getting smaller and smaller. The entire circuit of the early vacuum tube electronic computer weighing 30 tons can now be made entirely on a silicon wafer with a length of 4 mm. Encapsulated is much smaller than a matchbox. The 30-ton behemoth has changed and shrank to less than the size of a matchbox. It must be said that it is a miracle in the technical world! In this miraculous change, large-scale integrated circuits have played a major role.
Due to the high concentration of components and circuits in large-scale integrated circuits, the entire circuit is greatly reduced, and the number of lead-outs and solder joints is also greatly reduced. Using it to assemble electronic equipment, its assembly density can be increased by a hundred times or even hundreds of times over transistors, and the stable working time of the device can also be increased by hundreds of times. Therefore, it occupies a very important position in military communications equipment, missiles, radar, artificial satellites, and various remote control, telemetry and other military equipment. Particularly worth mentioning is the application of large-scale integrated circuits in electronic computers. With the advent of large-scale integrated circuits, electronic computers have been miniaturized. The emergence and use of a large number of microcomputers has played an increasingly important role in improving the efficiency of the production sector.
At present, large-scale integrated circuits are in the ascendant, and circuit forms and process methods are constantly developing. What level of integration technology will be reached in 1985 and what level will it reach in 2000? It is estimated that the integration level will reach 1 million components in 1985. That is to say, it is not long before a medium-sized computer is housed in a silicon chip, so-called "single-chip". Due to the development of integrated circuits, by the year 2000, large-screen flat-screen stereo televisions will appear; light-guided television phones such as those facing them will also appear. Various vehicles equipped with radar and computer automatic control system will effectively prevent accidents. Computer-managed medical records will effectively monitor the health of hundreds of millions of people. Robots equipped with electronic computers will perform various tasks efficiently.
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