(abbreviation for large-scale integration) The technology that enables whole electrical circuits to be etched into a piece of semiconducting material just a few millimeters square.
By the late 1960s a complete computer processor could be integrated on a single chip, or integrated circuit, and in 1971 the US electronics company Intel produced the first commercially available microprocessor. Very large-scale integration (VLSI) results in even smaller chips.
See large-scale integration.