What makes up a microprocessor?
Microprocessor is a small, thin chip of silicon crystal, typically less than half a square inch in area. It is contained in a packaging which is a square or rectangular piece with many pins that fits into the processor slot on your motherboard. The packaging both protects the processor from contaminants and allows it, through the pins, to engage the mother board’s circuits and hence the system is a whole. Over the years packaging has changed considerably, with new methods adopted for various processor design. Some of currently used packaging include: the pin-grid array(PGA) package, staggered pin-grid array package(used for Pentium processors), multichip module package(contains more than one chip), leadless chip carrier package(uses tiny contact pads of gold instead of pins), and tape-carrier package. Now let’s look at the inside of the microprocessor. Microprocessors work by reacting to an input of 0s and 1s (binary signals) in specific ways and then returning the output based on the
