Solid state: In smarter design and fabrication of ICs, power and logic are mixed on the same chip and circuits are integrated over an entire wafer

After several years of concentrated effort to make integrated-circuit features even smaller, solid-state engineers turned last year to new approaches that heighten the level of circuit integration, thus decreasing the cost and improving the reliability of systems by eliminating wiring and reducing the number of components. On the IC level, designers began to place logic gates and power-control devices on the same chip instead of building separate chips and wiring them together.