IC & Components

An integrated circuit (IC) is a collection of electronic components that are built on a small chip or wafer of semiconductor material. The components include Transistors, Microprocessors, Diodes, Capacitors, and Resistors. They are the ubiquitous little black "chips" you find on just about every circuit board. Unless you're some kind of crazy, analog electronics wizard, you're likely to have at least one IC in every electronics project you build, so it's important to understand them, inside and out. They come in all sorts of flavors: single-circuit logic gates, op amps, 555 timers, voltage regulators, motor controllers, microcontrollers, microprocessors, FPGAs...the list just goes on-and-on.