The emerging role of the european IC industry

Integrated solid-state circuits have gained much ground since they were first introduced. This gain has come about in at least three distinct fashions: 1) Standard (sometimes even off the shelf) low-or medium-scale integrated circuits enter electronic equipment in much the same way as the discrete components in earlier designs; 2)Programmable integrated circuit chips are one successful answer to the problem of regaining flexibility in the case of logic circuits. The microprocessor is the main example of this type of integrated circuit; and 3)the other answer to the same problem is the customer designed IC (CDIC).