Packing lots of components onto a silicon chip. As a rule of thumb you need large scale integration to put an average microprocessor on a chip. To get the whole microcomputer on the chip, external interfaces memory and all you need VLSI (Beware the term gets used very loosely).

This refers to chips containing thousands of transistors--but less than a million. See also ULSI, VLSI, MSI, and SSI.

The combining of about 1,000 to 10,000 circuits on a single chip. Typical examples of LSI circuits are memory chips and microprocessor.