Integrated Circuit Design

IC design or Integrated Circuit design is a sub-category of electronic engineering, encircling the specific logic and circuit design techniques needed to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs comprise small-scale electronic components such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc. fabricated into an electrical grid on a monolithic semiconductor.

Digital and analog IC designs are the two wide categories of IC design. Components like microprocessors, FPGAs, different memories (such as: RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs are produced by digital IC design. Digital design’s main focusing points are logical rightness, ensuring maximum circuit density, and placing circuits to ensure efficient routing of clock and timing signals. Power IC design and RF IC design are the fields in which Analog IC design has specialism. Analog IC design is used in the design of phase locked loops, op-amps, oscillators, linear regulators and active filters. Analog design bothers about the physics of the semiconductor devices like resistance, gain, power dissipation and matching. Integrity of analog signal amplification and filtering is generally critical and for this reason, analog integrated circuits use comparatively bigger area active devices than digital IC designs and commonly not so much dense in circuitry.

Home Diagnostic Tests Could Be Enabled By Microfluidic Integrated Circuit

Microfluidic integrated circuits have been originated by the researchers of University of Michigan as a technique to make simple lab-on-a-chip devices that could offer faster, low-cost and more portable medical tests.

These microfluidic circuits control the flowing of fluid through their devices without directions from outside systems. This process is similar to the computer chips where electronic circuits intelligently route the flow of electricity without external controls

A paper on the technology is recently disclosed online in Nature Physics.

A microfluidic device, or lab-on-a-chip, combines more than one laboratory operations onto one chip only centimeters in size. The devices make allowance for the researchers to experiment with very small sample sizes, and also to perform multiple experiments on the same material at the same time. They can be cut out to simulate the human body more nearly than the Petri dish does. They could lead to on-the-spot home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases are major among other advances.

"In most microfluidic devices today, there are essentially little fingers or pressure forces that open and close each individual valve to route fluid through the device during experiments. That is, there is an extra layer of control machinery that is required to manipulate the current in the fluidic circuit," said Shu Takayama, the principal investigator on the project. Takayama is an associate professor in the U-M Department of Biomedical Engineering.

That's same to how electronic circuits were manipulated a century before. Then, with the improvement of the integrated circuit, the "thinking" became embedded in the chip itself -- a technical step forward that enabled personal computers, Takayama said.

"We have literally made a microfluidic integrated circuit," said Bobak Mosadegh, a doctoral student in Takayama's lab who is first writer of the paper.

The outer controls that power today's microfluidic devices may be inconvenient. Every valve on a chip (and there could be dozens of them) needs its individual electromechanical push from an off-chip actuator or pump. This has made it hard to shrink microfluidic systems to palm- or fingertip-sized diagnostic devices.

The Takayama lab's innovation is a step in this direction. His research group has devised a strategy to produce the fluidic counterparts of key electrical components including transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors, and to efficiently network these components to automatically regulate fluid flow within the device.

Because of the use of conventional techniques in the making of these components, they are suitable for all other microfluidic components such as mixers, filters and cell culture chambers.

"We've made a versatile control system," Mosadegh said. "We envision that this technology will become a platform for researchers and companies in the microfluidics field to develop sophisticated self-controlled microfluidic devices that automatically process biofluids such as blood and pharmaceuticals for diagnostics or other applications.

"Just as the integrated circuit brought the digital information processing power of computers to the people, we envision our microfluidic analog will be able to do the same for cellular and biochemical information."

The university is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

Applications of FPGA

From technical aspect, any computable problem can be solved using an FPGA or Field Programmable Gate Array Applications. It is trivially cleared by the reality that a soft microprocessor can be implemented by FPGA. Their benefit keeps in that they are sometimes notably quicker for a number of applications because of their parallel characteristic and optimality in terms of the number of gates utilized for a particular method.

Specified uses of FPGAs comprise ASIC prototyping, digital signal processing, computer hardware emulation, software-defined radio, medical imaging, bioinformatics, computer vision, speech identification, cryptography, metal detection, radio astronomy and an increasing extent of other areas.

In the beginning, FPGAs started as challengers to CPLDs and contended in an analogous space, that of glue logic for PCBs. As their size, capacity, and speed enhanced, they started to takeover bigger and bigger functions to the point where few are now marketed as complete systems on chips (SoC). Especially with the launch of dedicated multipliers into FPGA architectures in the late 1990s, applications which had conventionally been the only reserve of DSPs started to incorporate FPGAs instead.

One more tendency on the usage of FPGAs is hardware acceleration, where one can use the FPGA to accelerate particular parts of an algorithm and share part of the computation between the FPGA and a general processor.

Story of Integrated Circuits

Integrated circuits (ICs) are considered as a foundation of present-day electronics. They are the cornerstones of most circuits. These are the omnipresent tiny black “chips” which come into view on just about every circuit board. If you are not some kind of insane, analog electronics wizard, perhaps you will have at least one IC in each electronics project you set up, so it is vital to understand them, inside and out.

A collection of electronic components like capacitors, resistors, transistors- all crammed into a small chip, and linked with each other to attain a common goal is called an IC. These come in various sorts and varieties: single-circuit logic gates, voltage regulators, microcontrollers, op amps, microprocessors, 555 timers, motor controllers, FPGAs… the list does not end.

We can visualize the tiny black chips by thinking about integrated circuits. But what does the black box contain? The actual “substance” to an integrated circuit is a complicated layer of semiconductor wafers, copper, and other materials, which interlinks to create resistors, transistors and various components in a circuit. The trimmed and well-formed amalgamation of these wafers is known as die.

The integrated chip itself is small and because of this the wafers of semiconductor and layers of copper it consists of are extremely thin. The interconnections between the layers are immensely complex. A die of an integrated chip is the circuit in its tiniest allowable form, too tiny to solder or connect to. The die is packaged, which makes our job of connecting to the IC effortless. The IC package turns the delicate, tiny die, into the black chip we’re all familiar with. The small and delicate die is turned into the black chip (which is familiar to all) by the IC package.

The integrated circuit die is encapsulated by the package and this package splays the die out into a device we can more conveniently connect to. Every outward connection on the die is linked via a small piece of gold wire to a pad or pin on the package. Pins are the silver, releasing terminals on an IC, which go on to attach to other parts of a circuit. Pins are what will go on to connect to the rest of the components and wires in a circuit. For this reason, these are most important to us.

There are numerous varieties of packages. Each of them has distinctive dimensions, mounting-types, and/or pin-counts. Majority of them are DIP, QDIP, SQP, PDIP, SOP, QFP, PLCC, SW, SQL, DPAK, SIP, SOS, TSOP, FDIP, TO3, TO2205, SOT23, SOT223, PENTAWATT and many more.

Each pin of an IC is unique in the cases of both location and function and all ICS are polarized. This means the package has to have some way to convey which pin is which. Maximum ICs use either a dot or a notch to specify which pin is the first pin. (Sometimes both, sometimes one or the other).

Once you know where the first pin is, the remaining pin numbers increase sequentially as you move counter-clockwise around the chip.