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She has a broad range of experience in research and writing, having covered subjects as diverse as the history of New York City’s community gardens and Beyonce’s 2018 Coachella performance. In broad terms, semiconductors can be classified into a small number of categories including memory chips, microprocessors, and integrated chips. Understanding which sub-sector of semiconductors a company largely operates can help better evaluate it as an investment and correctly identify its direct competitors. From the perspective of functionality, semiconductor memory chips store data and programs on computers and data storage devices. On the other hand, mobile devices like smartphones typically use an ARM chip architecture. When used in conjunction with a CPU, a GPU can increase computer performance by taking on some computationally-intensive functions, such as rendering, from the CPU.
This accelerates how quickly applications can process since the GPU can perform many calculations simultaneously. This shift also allowed for the development of more advanced and resource-intensive software and activities such as cryptocurrency mining. Produced in large batches, these chips are generally used in single-purpose appliances such as barcode scanners. Characterized by razor-thin margins, the commodity IC market is dominated by large Asian semiconductor makers. In the SoC, all of the electronic components needed for an entire system are built into a single chip. In a smartphone, the SoC may also integrate graphics, camera, and audio and video processing.
Adding a management chip and a radio chip results in a three-chip solution. Taking the other approach to categorizing chips, most computer processors currently use digital circuits. These circuits usually combine transistors and logic gates. Digital circuits use digital, discrete signals that are generally based on a binary scheme. Two different voltages are assigned, each representing a different logical value. Analog chips have been mostly, but not entirely, replaced by digital chips.