The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
Ultra-large scale integration, or ULSI for short, refers to the ability to position more than one million integrated circuits on a single computer chip. An integrated circuit is a circuit whose components are etched onto a slice of semiconductor material.
The ability to pack more integrated circuits onto a chip increases the computational power and speed of the computer or other machine in which the chip resides. The use of ULSI in a device permits operation at a lower voltage, lowers the power consumption and provides a higher speed of operation. Some of the devices that utilize ULSI technology are processors, scanners that convert printed information to coded data, semiconductor memory, semiconductors (such as the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor, or MOSFET), and the bipolar transistor, which amplifies analog and digital signals. The widely used Intel 486 and Pentium microprocessors--silicon chips that contain the computer's central processing unit--use USLI technology.
USLI is the largest type of integrated circuit. The other types rang in size from less than 100 circuits (small-scale integration) to between 100,000 and 1,000,000 (very-large scale integration, or VLSI). Operationally, the dividing line between VLSI and ULSI integrated circuits is often difficult to determine.