Semiconductor
Semiconductor
Semiconductor
For information on devices using semiconductors and the 20th century. Development of quantum physics in
their history, see semiconductor device. For other uses, turn allowed the development of the transistor in 1947.[3]
see Semiconductor (disambiguation).
Although some pure elements and many compounds display semiconductor properties, silicon, germanium, and
compounds of gallium are the most widely used in elecA semiconductor material has an electrical conductivity
value falling between that of a conductor, such as cop- tronic devices. Elements near the so-called metalloid
staircase, where the metalloids are located on the periper, and an insulator, such as glass. Semiconductors are
the foundation of modern electronics. Semiconducting odic table, are usually used as semiconductors.
materials exist in two types - elemental materials and
compound materials.[1] The modern understanding of the
properties of a semiconductor relies on quantum physics
to explain the movement of electrons and holes in a crystal
lattice.[2] The unique arrangement of the crystal lattice
makes silicon and germanium the most commonly used
elements in the preparation of semiconducting materials.
An increased knowledge of semiconductor materials and
fabrication processes has made possible continuing increases in the complexity and speed of microprocessors
and memory devices. Some of the information on this
page may be outdated within a year, due to the fact that
new discoveries are made in the eld frequently.[2]
The nickname of the southern area of Northern California is Silicon Valley because of all the inuential tech
companies that have their headquarters there. An integral part of todays technology is built upon semiconductors, which are made primarily of silicon. Some major
companies include Marvell Technology Group, National
Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices.[4]
1 Properties
Variable conductivity Semiconductors in their natural
state are poor conductors because a current requires
the ow of electrons, and semiconductors have their
valence bands lled. There are several developed
techniques that allows semiconducting materials to
behave like conducting materials, such as doping
or gating. These modications have two outcomes:
n-type and p-type. These refer to the excess or
shortage of electrons, respectively. An unbalanced
number of electrons would cause a current to ow
through the material.[1]
The electrical conductivity of a semiconductor material increases with increasing temperature, which is behaviour opposite to that of a metal. Semiconductor devices can display a range of useful properties such as passing current more easily in one direction than the other,
showing variable resistance, and sensitivity to light or
heat. Because the electrical properties of a semiconductor material can be modied by controlled addition of impurities, or by the application of electrical elds or light,
devices made from semiconductors can be used for amHeterojunctions Heterojunctions occur when two difplication, switching, and energy conversion.
ferently doped semiconducting materials are joined
Current conduction in a semiconductor occurs through
together. For example, a conguration could consist
the movement of free electrons and holes, collectively
of p-doped and n-doped germanium. This results
known as charge carriers. Adding impurity atoms to a
in an exchange of electrons and holes between the
semiconducting material, known as "doping", greatly indierently doped semiconducting materials. The
creases the number of charge carriers within it. When
n-doped germanium would have an excess of eleca doped semiconductor contains mostly free holes it is
trons, and the p-doped germanium would have an
called p-type, and when it contains mostly free elecexcess of holes. The transfer occurs until equilibtrons it is known as n-type. The semiconductor materium is reached by a process called recombination,
rials used in electronic devices are doped under precise
which causes the migrating electrons from the nconditions to control the concentration and regions of ptype to come in contact with the migrating holes
and n-type dopants. A single semiconductor crystal can
from the p-type. A product of this process is
have many p- and n-type regions; the pn junctions becharged ions, which result in an electric eld.[1][2]
tween these regions are responsible for the useful electronic behaviour.
Excited Electrons A dierence in electric potential on
a semiconducting material would cause it to leave
thermal equilibrium and create a non-equilibrium
situation. This introduces electrons and holes to
2 MATERIALS
the system, which interact via a process called
ambipolar diusion. Whenever thermal equilibrium is disturbed in a semiconducting material, the
amount of holes and electrons changes. Such disruptions can occur as a result of a temperature dierence or photons, which can enter the system and create electrons and holes. The process that creates and
annihilates electrons and holes are called generation
and recombination.[1]
Light emission In certain semiconductors, excited electrons can relax by emitting light instead of producing heat. These semiconductors are used in the
construction of light emitting diodes and uorescent
quantum dots.
Materials
2.1
Main article: List of semiconductor materials
A large number of elements and compounds have semi-
3.2
Physics of semiconductors
3
the Pauli exclusion principle). These states are associated with the electronic band structure of the material.
Electrical conductivity arises due to the presence of electrons in states that are delocalized (extending through the
material), however in order to transport electrons a state
must be partially lled, containing an electron only part
of the time.[6] If the state is always occupied with an electron, then it is inert, blocking the passage of other electrons via that state. The energies of these quantum states
are critical, since a state is partially lled only if its energy
is near the Fermi level (see FermiDirac statistics).
High conductivity in a material comes from it having
many partially lled states and much state delocalization.
Metals are good electrical conductors and have many partially lled states with energies near their Fermi level.
Insulators, by contrast, have few partially lled states,
their Fermi levels sit within band gaps with few energy
states to occupy. Importantly, an insulator can be made
to conduct by increasing its temperature: heating provides energy to promote some electrons across the band
gap, inducing partially lled states in both the band of
states beneath the band gap (valence band) and the band
of states above the band gap (conduction band). An (intrinsic) semiconductor has a band gap that is smaller than
that of an insulator and at room temperature signicant
numbers of electrons can be excited to cross the band
gap.[7]
Filling of the electronic Density of states in various types of materials at equilibrium. Here the vertical axis is energy while the
horizontal axis is the Density of states for a particular band in
the material listed. In metals and semimetals the Fermi level EF
lies inside at least one band. In insulators and semiconductors
the Fermi level is inside a band gap; however, in semiconductors the bands are near enough to the Fermi level to be thermally
populated with electrons or holes.
Some wider-band gap semiconductor materials are sometimes referred to as semi-insulators. When undoped,
these have electrical conductivity nearer to that of electrical insulators, however they can be doped (making
them as useful as semiconductors). Semi-insulators nd
niche applications in micro-electronics, such as substrates
for HEMT. An example of a common semi-insulator
is gallium arsenide.[8] Some materials, such as titanium
dioxide, can even be used as insulating materials for some
applications, while being treated as wide-gap semiconductors for other applications.
around for some time. The actual concentration of electrons is typically very dilute, and so (unlike in metals)
it is possible to think of the electrons in the conduction
band of a semiconductor as a sort of classical ideal gas,
where the electrons y around freely without being subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. In most semiconductors the conduction bands have a parabolic dispersion
relation, and so these electrons respond to forces (electric eld, magnetic eld, etc.) much like they would in
a vacuum, though with a dierent eective mass.[7] Because the electrons behave like an ideal gas, one may also
think about conduction in very simplistic terms such as
the Drude model, and introduce concepts such as electron
mobility.
PHYSICS OF SEMICONDUCTORS
3.2.1
3.3 Doping
Main article: Doping (semiconductor)
The conductivity of semiconductors may easily be modied by introducing impurities into their crystal lattice.
The process of adding controlled impurities to a semiconductor is known as doping. The amount of impurity, or
dopant, added to an intrinsic (pure) semiconductor varies
its level of conductivity. Doped semiconductors are referred to as extrinsic. By adding impurity to the pure
semiconductors, the electrical conductivity may be varied by factors of thousands or millions.
5
For example, the pure semiconductor silicon has four valence electrons which bond each silicon atom to its neighbors. In silicon, the most common dopants are group III
and group V elements. Group III elements all contain
three valence electrons, causing them to function as acceptors when used to dope silicon. When an acceptor
atom replaces a silicon atom in the crystal, a vacant state
( an electron hole) is created, which can move around
the lattice and functions as a charge carrier. Group V
elements have ve valence electrons, which allows them
to act as a donor; substitution of these atoms for silicon creates an extra free electron. Therefore, a silicon
crystal doped with boron creates a p-type semiconductor
whereas one doped with phosphorus results in an n-type
material.
Agreement between theoretical predictions (based on developing quantum mechanics) and experimental results
was sometimes poor. This was later explained by John
Bardeen as due to the extreme structure sensitive behavior of semiconductors, whose properties change dramatically based on tiny amounts of impurities.[13] Compure materials of the 1920s containing varying
4 Early history of semiconductors mercially
proportions of trace contaminants produced diering experimental results. This spurred the development of imFurther information: Timeline of electrical and elec- proved material rening techniques, culminating in modtronic engineering
ern semiconductor reneries producing materials with
parts-per-trillion purity.
The history of the understanding of semiconductors begins with experiments on the electrical properties of materials. The properties of negative temperature coecient of resistance, rectication, and light-sensitivity were
observed starting in the early 19th century.
In 1833, Michael Faraday reported that the resistance
of specimens of silver sulde decreases when they are
heated. This is contrary to the behavior of metallic substances such as copper. In 1839, A. E. Becquerel reported
observation of a voltage between a solid and a liquid electrolyte when struck by light, the photovoltaic eect. In
1873 Willoughby Smith observed that selenium resistors
exhibit decreasing resistance when light falls on them.
In 1874 Karl Ferdinand Braun observed conduction and
rectication in metallic sulphides, and Arthur Schuster
found that a copper oxide layer on wires has rectication
properties that ceases when the wires are cleaned. Adams
and Day observed the photovoltaic eect in selenium in
1876.[10]
A unied explanation of these phenomena required a theory of solid-state physics which developed greatly in the
rst half of the 20th Century. In 1878 Edwin Herbert
Hall demonstrated the deection of owing charge carriers by an applied magnetic eld, the Hall eect. The discovery of the electron by J.J. Thomson in 1897 prompted
theories of electron-based conduction in solids. Karl
Baedeker, by observing a Hall eect with the reverse
sign to that in metals, theorized that copper iodide had
positive charge carriers. Johan Koenigsberger classied
solid materials as metals, insulators and variable conduc-
7 FURTHER READING
oVBNQwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
In France, during the war, Herbert Matar had observed
amplication between adjacent point contacts on a germanium base. After the war, Matar's group announced [13] Peter Robin Morris (1990) A History of the World Semiconductor Industry, IET, ISBN 0863412270, pp. 1125
their "Transistron" amplier only shortly after Bell Labs
announced the "transistor".
See also
Semiconductor industry The 300 billion dollar
sector of the worlds economy that designs and manufactures semiconductor devices.
Semiconductor characterization techniques A
wide variety of techniques are used to analyze the
properties of semiconductors.
References
7 Further reading
A. A. Balandin and K. L. Wang (2006). Handbook of Semiconductor Nanostructures and Nanodevices (5-Volume Set). American Scientic Publishers. ISBN 1-58883-073-X.
Sze, Simon M. (1981). Physics of Semiconductor
Devices (2nd ed.). John Wiley and Sons (WIE).
ISBN 0-471-05661-8.
Turley, Jim (2002). The Essential Guide to Semiconductors. Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN 0-13-046404-X.
Yu, Peter Y.; Cardona, Manuel (2004). Fundamentals of Semiconductors : Physics and Materials Properties. Springer. ISBN 3-540-41323-5.
Sadao Adachi (2012). The Handbook on Optical
Constants of Semiconductors: In Tables and Figures. World Scientic Publishing. ISBN 9-78981440597-3.
External links
Howstuworks semiconductor page
Semiconductor Concepts at Hyperphysics
Calculator for the intrinsic carrier concentration in
silicon
Semiconductor OneSource Hall of Fame, Glossary
Principles of Semiconductor Devices by Bart Van
Zeghbroeck, University of Colorado. An online
textbook]
US Navy Electrical Engineering Training Series
NSM-Archive Physical Properties of Semiconductors]
Semiconductor Manufacturer List
ABACUS : Introduction to Semiconductor Devices
by Gerhard Klimeck and Dragica Vasileska, online
learning resource with simulation tools on nanoHUB
Organic Semiconductor page
DoITPoMS Teaching and Learning Package- Introduction to Semiconductors
Semiconductor R&D Talent Locations report
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