What is it?
Shorthand for a piece (or chip) of a semiconductor wafer. The major market in chips, today, uses silicon - an element that has semiconducting properties like germanium. A chip
contains an electronic circuit made up, mainly, of conductors (wires), transistors and resistors. It is also possible to include capacitors, inductors and diodes for example. The whole circuit is
encapsulated within a protective block (usually plastic) with emerging pins that allow electrical connections between the circuit on the chip and the rest of the equipment (usually via a printed wiring
board - PWB - also sometimes called a PCB - printed circuit board). There are some chips that have external optical connexions too. As chips become denser (more transistors per square or
cubic millimetre - there may be 10 million transistors on a chip!!) and faster (e.g. clock speeds like 1 GHz - 1,000,000,000 cycles per second!!) it is necessary to consider heat
management. Heat management is necessary to keep down the temperature of the transistors on the chip to avoid them vapourising! Techniques for heat management include conduction through the
chip’s pins, radiation and convection from from the chip’s external protective surface - which may be enhanced by structures on the external chip body -
like a fin. Convection can be improved by a small fan attached to the heat sink. Internal conduction of heat from the active components to the external heat exchanger can use heat pipes.
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