The working principle of the chip is that the circuit is manufactured on the surface of the semiconductor chip for calculation and processing.
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Integrated circuits have two main advantages over discrete transistors: cost and performance. The low cost is due to the fact that the chip prints all of its components as a unit through photolithography, rather than making just one transistor at a time.
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The high performance is due to the fast switching of the components, which consumes less energy because the components are small and close to each other. In 2006, the chip area ranged from a few square millimeters to 350 mm2, which could reach one million transistors per mm2.
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Digital integrated circuits can contain anything from a few thousand to a million logic gates, triggers, multiplexers, and other circuits on a few square millimeters.
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The small size of these circuits allows for higher speeds, lower power consumption (see Low power Design) and reduced manufacturing costs compared to board-level integration. These digital ics, represented by microprocessors, digital signal processors, and microcontrollers, work with binary, processing 1 and 0 signals.