Semiconductors

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Semiconductors

Silicon is the raw material most often used in
integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. It is the second
most abundant substance on the earth. It is
extracted from rocks and common beach sand
and put through an exhaustive purification process.
In this form, silicon is the purist industrial
substance that man produces, with impurities
comprising less than one part in a billion. That is
the equivalent of one tennis ball in a string of golf
balls stretching from the earth to the moon.
Semiconductors are usually materials which have
energy-band gaps smaller than 2eV. An important
property of semiconductors is the ability to change
their resistivity over several orders of magnitude
by doping. Semiconductors have electrical
resistivities between 10-5 and 107 ohms.
Semiconductors can be crystalline or amorphous.
Elemental semiconductors are simple-element
semiconductor materials such as silicon or
germanium. Silicon is the most common
semiconductor material used today. It is used for
diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, memories,
infrared detection and lenses, light-emitting diodes
(LED), photosensors, strain gages, solar cells,
charge transfer devices, radiation detectors and a
variety of other devices. Silicon belongs to the
group IV in the periodic table. It is a grey brittle
material with a diamond cubic structure. Silicon is
conventionally doped with Phosphorus, Arsenic
and Antimony and Boron, Aluminum, and Gallium
acceptors. The energy gap of silicon is 1.1 eV.
This value permits the operation of silicon
semiconductors devices at higher temperatures
than germanium. Now I will give you some brief
history of the evolution of electronics which will
help you understand more about semiconductors
and the silicon chip. In the early 1900's before
integrated circuits and silicon chips were invented,
computers and radios were made with vacuum
tubes. The vacuum tube was invented in 1906 by
Dr.Lee DeForest. Throughout the first half of the
20th century, vacuum tubes were used to conduct,
modulate and amplify electrical signals. They made
possible a variety of new products including the
radio and the computer. However vacuum tubes
had some inherent problems. They were bulky,
delicate and expensive, consumed a great deal of
power, took time to warm up, got very hot, and
eventually burned out. The first digital computer
contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 50 tins,
and required 140 kilowatts of power. By the
1930's, researchers at the Bell Telephone
Lab

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