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Microprocessor Unit
The advent of the microprocessor
followed on from advances in the field of large scale integration (LSI)
technology first investigated in the late 1950s. The technology for
manufacturing integrated circuits improved over the next twenty years and in
1971 the first microprocessor was produced on a single chip (wafer thin slice)
of Silicon.
Today, many thousands of
components can be built onto a single chip some 5 mm square and no more than 1
mm thick and the density of circuits is increasing all the time. A single chip
can contain all the circuitry to perform the combined functions of the control
unit and arithmetic/logic unit of the traditionally structured computer. Such a
chip is called a microprocessor unit (MPU). It is not a complete computer as it
lacks memory and input/output capability.
