Chips

Chips is a term with multiple meanings, most commonly referring to snack foods and semiconductor devices known as chips or integrated circuits.

Snack chips are thin, crisp food products made by frying or baking slices or shreds of vegetables or starch-containing ingredients. The best-known example is potato chips, but tortilla, corn, pita, and plantain chips are common as well. Production typically starts with selecting and preparing raw material, followed by thin slicing, moisture reduction, and either deep frying or baking to achieve crispness. Chips are then seasoned, often with salt and a variety of flavors, and packaged for shelf stability. Nutritional profiles vary, but many varieties are energy-dense and high in fat and salt.

Electronic chips, or integrated circuits, are miniature networks of transistors and other components manufactured on a single piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. They perform a wide range of functions in modern devices, from data processing to memory storage and signal management. Fabrication involves multiple steps of photolithography, doping, layering, and etching to build transistors and interconnections on a wafer, followed by dicing and packaging. Modern chips are produced with nanometer-scale process nodes and may be microprocessors, memory chips, or specialized devices such as application-specific integrated circuits. The semiconductor industry includes design-focused firms, often described as fabless, and manufacturing facilities known as foundries.

Both uses of the term reflect the idea of small, functional pieces central to larger systems.