In 1961 the first commercially available integrated circuits came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. They later used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors, and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie finger. Today an IC smaller than a penny can hold 125 million transistors.

Jack Kilby holds patents on over sixty inventions and is also well known as the inventor of the portable calculator (1967). In 1970 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Robert Noyce, with sixteen patents to his name, founded Intel, the company responsible for the invention of the microprocessor, in 1968. But for both men, the invention of the integrated circuit stands historically as one of the most important innovations of mankind. Almost all modern products use chip technology.

Vocabulary:

monolithic integrated circuit – монолитная интегральная схема

Electrical Current

Electrical current is a measure of the amount of electrical charge transferred per unit of time. It represents the flow of electrons through a conductive material, such as a metal wire. It is measured in amperes.

Units for Electrical Current

The SI unit of electrical current is the ampere, defined as 1 coulomb/second. Current is a quantity, meaning it is the same number regardless of the direction of the flow, without a positive or negative number. However, in circuit analysis, the direction of current is relevant.

The conventional symbol for current is I, which originates from the French phrase intensité de courant, meaning current intensity. Current intensity is often referred to simply as current.

The I symbol was used by André-Marie Ampère, after whom the unit of electric current is named. He used the I symbol in formulating Ampère's force law in 1820. The notation traveled from France to Great Britain, where it became standard, although at least one journal did not change from using C to I until 1896.

Ohm's Law Governing Electrical Current

Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference across the two points. Introducing the constant of proportionality, the resistance, one arrives at the usual mathematical equation that describes this relationship:

I=V/R

In this relationship, I is the current through the conductor in units of amperes, V is the potential difference measured across the conductor in units of volts, and R is

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