electronics//ASIC

Application-specific integrated circuit — a chip designed for exactly one task.

Application-specific integrated circuit — a chip designed for exactly one task.

Unlike a general-purpose CPU or programmable MCU, an ASIC's logic is frozen at fab time.

Delivers maximum throughput per watt for fixed workloads — Bitcoin mining, video encoding, network packet processing.

TPU is a category of ML-focused ASIC.

Design cost is high, so ASICs only make sense at volume.

Common ASICs found inside MCUs and SoCs: TPU, NIC, NPU, DSP, GPU, ISP.

Math embedded as silicon: y = mx + n computed on-circuit with no instruction overhead.

DSP: soundwave ⟶ spectrogram (filters noise via Fourier Transforms)

Narrow, task-custom-made; attached to the silicon, only does one thing.

Google's TPUs are ASICs (no core intelligence, pure matrix math)