Integrated circuits are small electronic components which contain millions of electronic components inside it. Integrated circuits can greatly decrease the size of you circuits because circuits which normally require a large space is fitted into a very small space. This very small component acts like the circuit inside it. These integrated circuits or ICs are manufactured from a semiconductor material and is altered to produce its equivalent circuit. There is no general way of testing ICs because each IC contains a different circuit inside it. There are also several types of IC casing available.
In this type of casing, we number the pins of the IC is a counterclockwise direction. There is always a mark like the one in the drawing which indicates the orientation of the IC. The pin numbers can then be identified by marking the lower left pin as pin number 1 and then go counterclockwise, till you reach the last pin. This is how the pins are numbered in the IC. The drawing is of a 14 pin IC but there are also 8 pin, 16 pin ICs available depending on the component number of the IC.
ICs also have specification sheets which show what the circuit contained in it does. It also includes information like maximum and minimum current and voltage capacity of the IC.
