How to study a ic chip

Hi Leong,

Every IC is different, and many datasheets will be extremely hard to understand for a beginner. It may be better to learn about ICs from basic electronics books until you're familiar with what to look for in datasheets - the books will teach you about a few popular ICs. Most beginner books cover a few op amps and the 555 timer IC for example.

You should look into some basic electronics first to get familiar with the symbols and terminology.

Until you know what the components do, you will probably just be lost looking at datasheets.  They are intended for people who have been educated in the components and how to put them together.

You need to study basic circuits first.  An IC is basically a circuit implemented on a single chip or die.

So start small and get comfortable with electronics first.

Understanding datasheets come with time and experience.

DAB

Hi Leong,

I suggest that you get a microcontroller like the Arduino or - better as powerful - chipkit for first and a couple of breadboard. If I were you I will ignore for now more complex and powerful boards like the Raspberry PI or BBB because involves many other aspects that you should know to get simple results while as far as what you write you need to start basically. Then take an interesting IC at a time, isolating it from the context and start seeing how it works and how you can make a simple circuit to control it.

This gives you more knowledge in few time and probably you will enjoy seeing things working in your hands. IMHO ignore che various starter kits as 80-90% of the content is absolutely more expansive than what you can buy as spare parts (e.g. resistors, capacitors, LEDs etc.) Focus the attention on a IC kind at a time then slowly following your knowledge and understanding start using the ICs always in more complex projects . And you will see that step by step you discover and enjoy how many things you can do. Here on Element14 you can find a wide amount of shared knowledge and a lot of very good persons that are happy to teach and help you.

If I can suggest a sort of complexity scale from the easiest to the more complex, you can start with monochrome LEDs controlled on/off then try adding tim features with PWM signals, then add a potentiometer and discover how the analog reading works. Use the analog readings to manage a temperature sensor, try with touch sensors ... And so on.

As you can see in the next future is that there are many different ICs for every kind of project you can try to do, from motor control to temperature detection, light variable resistors and so on. So, organise your self-learning plan by category and try using similar but different ICs that can do the same thing to see what are the differences before moving to another IC category.

Last, in my opinion you can understand how to read at least the most descriptive part of the ICs datasheets just doing a project with it, then stepback and try to see exactly why the IC you are using has a certain kind of response and what is explained on the datasheet. Take in account that not all the producers makes understandable technical documentation; privilege those that gives a bigger datasheet with circuit examples, detailed informations on how to manage the component, how to program it etc.

And go ahead with the help of all, step by step.

Enrico