What is the difference between a chip, a semiconductor, and an integrated circuit?

On this issue, everyone knows a lot about hardware and may know it clearly. Let's look at the analysis of several respondents and get familiar with it.

01

The first is from Zhihu: Hetzer Manning

Semiconductor is a general term for a class of materials, an integrated circuit is a large collection of circuits made of semiconductor materials, and a chip is a product formed by different types of integrated circuits or a single type of integrated circuit.

Corresponding to the daily necessities that everyone understands, semiconductors are all kinds of paper fibers, integrated circuits are a stack of paper, and chips are books or books.

The various improvements that the semiconductor industry is currently striving for are nothing more than three

1. Find new fibers to make better reading carriers.

2. Use the existing papermaking technology to make paper cheaper, whiter and thinner.

3. Use color printing, coated paper and other methods in the middle of the book or notebook to make the book or notebook have a better use experience.

02

The second one came from Zhihu's answer: Shi Dasheng

Chip (Integrated Circuit) Practitioner @ Shi Dasheng answered, I am a semiconductor equipment salesman.

This question is too suitable for me. I have been introducing myself with the first sentence, which also contains these three key words.

Semiconductor refers to a material whose conductivity is between a conductor and an insulator at room temperature. Common semiconductor materials are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, etc., and silicon is the most influential one in various semiconductor materials applications.

Compared with conductors and insulators, the discovery of semiconductor materials was the latest. It was not until the 1930 s that the existence of semiconductors was truly recognized by academia when the purification technology of materials was improved.

Semiconductors are mainly composed of four components: integrated circuits (integrated circuit), optoelectronic devices, discrete devices, and sensors. Since integrated circuits account for more than 80% of the devices, semiconductors and integrated circuits are usually equivalent.

Integrated circuits are divided into four main categories according to product types: microprocessors, memories, logic devices, and analog devices. Usually we collectively call them chips.

Integrated circuits can integrate analog and digital circuits on a single chip to make devices such as analog-to-digital converters and digital-to-analog converters. Such a circuit provides smaller size and lower cost.

Usually, the chips we call are black boxes the size of fingernails we see. These are all packaged, as shown in the figure:

Inside the black box is die, as shown in the figure, each small grid is a die:

Die is an integrated circuit, which is engraved by a lithography machine:

In summary, it can be considered that semiconductor> integrated circuit = chip

03

The third answer is: hardware enthusiasts

1. what is a chip

Chip, also known as microcircuit, microchip, integrated circuit (integrated circuit, IC), refers to the silicon chip containing integrated circuits, small size, often as part of a computer or other electronic equipment. Chip is a general term for semiconductor component products, which is the carrier of integrated circuits and is divided from wafers. A silicon chip is a small piece of silicon that contains an integrated circuit that is part of a computer or other electronic device.

2. what is a semiconductor semiconductor (semiconductor), refers to the normal temperature conductivity between the conductor (conductor) and insulator (insulator) between the material. For example, diodes are devices made of semiconductors. A semiconductor refers to a material whose conductivity can be controlled, ranging from an insulator to a conductor. Whether from the perspective of technology or economic development, the importance of semiconductors is very huge. Most of today's electronic products, such as computers, mobile phones or digital recorders, have a very close relationship with semiconductors. Common semiconductor materials are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, etc., and silicon is a variety of semiconductor materials, in the commercial application of the most influential one. Matter exists in a variety of forms, such as solid, liquid, gas plasma, etc. We usually refer to materials with poor conductivity, such as coal, artificial crystals, amber, ceramics, etc., as insulators. The conductivity of the better metals such as gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, aluminum and other known as conductors. A material between a conductor and an insulator can be simply referred to as a semiconductor.

3. what an integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (integrated circuit) is a miniature electronic device or component. Using a certain process, the transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors and other components and wiring required in a circuit are interconnected together, made on a small piece or several small pieces of semiconductor chips or dielectric substrates, and then packaged in a tube shell to become a miniature structure with the required circuit functions. All components have formed a whole in structure, so that the electronic components towards micro-miniaturization, low power consumption, intelligent and high reliability has taken a big step. It is represented in the circuit by the letters "IC. The inventors of the integrated circuit are Jack Kilby (germanium (Ge) based integrated circuit) and Robert Neuth (silicon (Si) based integrated circuit). The majority of applications in the semiconductor industry today are silicon-based integrated circuits. Integrated circuit is a new type of semiconductor device developed in the late 1950 s and 1960 s. It is a semiconductor manufacturing process such as oxidation, lithography, diffusion, epitaxy, and aluminum evaporation. The semiconductors, resistors, capacitors and other components required to form a circuit with a certain function and the connecting wires between them are all integrated on a small piece of silicon. The electronic device is then welded and packaged in a shell. Its packaging shell has round shell, flat or double in-line and other forms. Integrated circuit technology includes chip manufacturing technology and design technology, which is mainly reflected in the ability of processing equipment, processing technology, packaging and testing, mass production and design innovation.

What is the difference between a 4. chip and an integrated circuit? The emphasis to be expressed is different. A chip is a chip, which generally refers to something that you can see with your naked eye that is covered with a lot of small feet or that your feet cannot see, but is obviously square. However, the chip also includes various chips, such as baseband, voltage conversion, etc. The processor places more emphasis on function, referring to the unit that performs processing, which can be said to be MCU, CPU, etc. The range of integrated circuits is much wider. Even if some resistors, capacitors and diodes are integrated together, it may be an analog signal conversion chip or a logic control chip, but in general, this concept is more biased towards the bottom. Integrated circuit refers to the active devices, passive components and their interconnections that make up the circuit are made together on a semiconductor substrate or on an insulating substrate to form a structurally closely connected, internally related electronic circuit. It can be divided into three main branches: semiconductor integrated circuit, film integrated circuit and hybrid integrated circuit. Chip (chip) is the semiconductor component products collectively, is the integrated circuit (IC, integrated circuit) carrier, divided by the wafer.

5. semiconductor integrated circuits and semiconductor chips What is the relationship and difference? Chip is an abbreviation of integrated circuits, in fact, the real meaning of the word chip refers to the integrated circuit package inside a little bit of a large semiconductor chip, that is, the die. Strictly speaking, chips and integrated circuits are not interchangeable. Integrated circuits are manufactured through semiconductor technology, thin film technology and thick film technology. Any circuit that miniaturizes a certain function and is made in a certain packaged circuit form can be called integrated circuit. A semiconductor is a substance between a good conductor and a non-good conductor (or insulator). The semiconductor integrated circuit includes a semiconductor chip and peripheral related circuits.

6. semiconductor integrated circuit semiconductor integrated circuit is the transistor, diode and other active components and resistors, capacitors and other passive components, according to a certain circuit interconnection, "integrated" on a single semiconductor chip, so as to complete a specific circuit or system function. Semiconductor chips are etched on a semiconductor sheet and wired to make a semiconductor device capable of achieving a certain function. Not only silicon chips, but also gallium arsenide (gallium arsenide is toxic, so some inferior circuit boards should not be curious to decompose it), germanium and other semiconductor materials. Semiconductors also have a trend like cars. In the 1970 s, American companies such as Intel gained the upper hand in the dynamic random access memory (D-RAM) market. However, due to the emergence of large computers, the need for high-performance D-RAM in the 1980 s, Japanese companies ranked first.