What is an integrated circuit. 1. Listen to the text AND answer the questions below

Warm up

1. Listen to the text and answer the questions below.

Have you ever heard of a 1940s computer called the ENIAC? It was about the same length and weight as three to four double-decker buses and contained 18,000 buzzing electronic switches known as vacuum tubes. Despite its gargantuan size, it was thousands of times less powerful than a modern laptop – a machine about 100 times smaller.

If the history of computing sounds like a magic trick – squeezing more and more power into less and less space – it is! What made it possible was the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958. It's a neat way of cramming hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of electronic components onto tiny chips of silicon no bigger than a fingernail. Let's take a closer look at ICs and how they work!

1) What was the ENIAC?

2) When was the ENIAC used?

3) What was the ENIAC’s size?

4) How many vacuum tubes did the ENIAC contain?

5) What invention made it possible to squeeze more power into less space? When was it?

Reading

2. Match the descriptions 1-3 with the photos a-c in Fig. 4.2. Put the descriptions in logical order. Give names to the photos a-c in Fig. 4.2.

a) b)

c)

Fig. 4.2 Photo by courtesy of NASA Glenn Researech Center (NASA-GLC).

1) A traditional printed circuit board (PCB) like this has tracks linking together the terminals (metal connecting legs) from different electronic components. Think of the tracks as "streets" making paths between "buildings" where useful things are done (the components themselves). There's a miniaturized version of a circuit board inside an integrated circuit: the tracks are created in microscopic form on the surface of a silicon wafer.

2) If you could lift the cover off a typical microchip, this is what you'd find inside. The integrated circuit is the tiny square in the center. Connections run out from it to the terminals (metal pins or legs) around the edge. When you hook up something to one of these terminals, you're actually connecting into the circuit itself. You can just see the pattern of electronic components on the surface of the chip itself.

3) This is what an IC looks like when it's conveniently packaged inside a flash memory chip. Inside the black protective case, there's a tiny integrated circuit, with millions of transistors capable of storing millions of binary digits of information.

Vocabulary

3. Match the rearranged parts of the word combinations.

vacuum integrated printed gargantuan electronic metal connecting miniaturized silicon flash protective binary

version memory chip digit components tubes circuit case size circuit board wafer legs (pins)

Scanning

4. Check your fast reading and try to be the first to match the words below with their definitions.

Open up a television or a radio and you'll see an integrated circuit built around a printed circuit board (PCB): a bit like an electric street-map with small electronic components (such as resistors and capacitors) in place of the buildings and printed copper connections linking them together like miniature metal streets. Circuit boards are fine in small appliances like this, but if you try to use the same technique to build a complex electronic machine, such as a computer, you quickly hit a snag. Even the simplest computer needs eight electronic switches to store a single byte (character) of information. So if you want to build a computer with just enough memory to store this paragraph, you're looking at about 750 characters times 8 or about 6000 switches – for a single paragraph! If you plump for switches like they had in the ENIAC – vacuum tubes about the size of an adult thumb – you soon end up with a whopping great big, power-hungry machine that needs its own mini electricity plant to keep it running.

resistor capacitor appliance switch to hit a snag character to plump for whopping thumb

extremely large a short, thick finger of a human hand a device for turning on or off to decide in favor of something a device for accumulating electricity instrument, device to run into an unexpected problem unit of information a device to introduce resistance

Listening

5. Listen to the text and describe the words in the box, using synonyms, antonyms, definitions etc.

transistor improve fraction relay reliable tangled linking wire integrated circuit silicon gadgets connections

 

When three American physicists invented transistors in 1947, things improved somewhat. Transistors were a fraction the size of vacuum tubes and relays (the electromagnetic switches that had started to replace vacuum tubes in the mid-1940s), used much less power, and were far more reliable. But there was still the problem of linking all those transistors together in complex circuits. Imagine having to wire hundreds of millions of transistors onto a PCB! Even after transistors were invented, computers were still a tangled mass of wires.

Integrated circuits changed all that. The basic idea was to take a complete circuit, with all its many components and the connections between them, and recreate the whole thing in microscopically tiny form on the surface of a piece of silicon. It was an amazingly clever idea and it has made possible all kinds of "microelectronic" gadgets we now take for granted, from digital watches and pocket calculators to Moon-landing rockets and missiles with built-in satellite navigation.

Speaking

6. Work in pairs. Make dialogues, discuss the following issues.

What was the role of the integrated circuit invention?

What is the construction of an integrated circuit?