Linear integrated circuit

A linear integrated circuit or analog chip is a set of miniature electronic analog circuits formed on a single piece of semiconductor material.

"Analog chip" and "Analog integrated circuit" redirect here. For mixed analog-digital chips, see Mixed-signal integrated circuit.

Description

The voltage and current at specified points in the circuits of analog chips vary continuously over time. In contrast, digital chips only use and create voltages or currents at discrete levels, with no intermediate values. In addition to transistors, analog chips often include a larger number of passive elements (capacitors, resistors, and inductors) than digital chips. Inductors tend to be avoided because of their large size, and transistors and capacitors together can do the work of inductors.

Analog chips may also contain digital logic elements to replace some analog functions, or to allow the chip to communicate with a microprocessor. For this reason and since logic is commonly implemented using CMOS technology, these chips use BiCMOS processes by companies such as Freescale, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, and others. This is known as mixed signal processing and allows a designer to incorporate more functions in the chip. Some of the benefits include load protection, reduced parts count and higher reliability.[1]

Pure analog chips in information processing have been mostly replaced with digital chips. Analog chips are still required for wideband signals, high-power applications, and transducer interfaces. Research and industry in the field continues to grow and prosper. Some examples of long-lived and well-known analog chips are the 741 Operational Amplifier, and the 555 timer IC.

Power supply chips are also considered to be analog chips. Their main purpose is to produce a well-regulated output voltage supply for other chips in the system. Since all electronic systems require electrical power, power supply ICs PMICs are important elements of those systems.

Important basic building blocks of analog chip design include:

All the above circuit building blocks can be implemented using bipolar technology as well as Metal-Oxide-Silicon(MOS) technology. MOS band gap references use lateral (poor) bipolar transistors for their functioning.

People who have specialized in this field include Bob Widlar, Bob Pease, Hans Camenzind, George Erdi, and Barrie Gilbert among others.

gollark: There are some important considerations here: it should be able to deal with damaged/partial files, encryption would be nice to have (it would probably work to just run it through authenticated AES-whatever when writing), adding new files shouldn't require tons of seeking, and it might be necessary to store backups on FAT32 disks so maybe it needs to be able of using multiple files somehow.
gollark: Hmm, so, designoidal idea:- files have the following metadata: filename, last modified time, maybe permissions (I may not actually need this), size, checksum, flags (in case I need this later; probably just compression format?)- each version of a file in an archive has this metadata in front of it- when all the files in some set of data are archived, a header gets written to the end with all the file metadata plus positions- when backup is rerun, the system™ just checks the last modified time of everything and sees if its local copies are newer, and if so appends them to the end; when it is done a new header is added containing all the files- when a backup needs to be extracted, it just reads the end and decompresses stuff at the right offset
gollark: I don't know what you mean "dofs", data offsets?
gollark: Well, this will of course be rustaceous.
gollark: So that makes sense.

See also

References
  1. Information Freescale website, Mar 28th 2010, About Freescale Analog Products
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