What is a semiconductor? Understand semiconductor characteristics and industry classifications

What is a Semiconductor material? It refers to the conductive network performance at room temperature and the solid formation of crystals between the metal Cond...

Nov 22,2023 | Constance

What is a Semiconductor material? It refers to the conductive network performance at room temperature and the solid formation of crystals between the metal Conductor and the Insulator. Today, most of China's electronic technology products, such as computers, mobile phones, etc., are inseparable from national semiconductors.

What is a semiconductor?

A semiconductor is a room-temperature conducting crystal between a conductor (conductor) and an insulator (insulator).

Semi means half of a semiconductor. Semiconductors are often referred to by abbreviations such as semi or semicon, and the Semiconductor Union means semiconductor Union, abbreviated SemiUnion.

Semiconductors can be used to make a variety of electronic devices, including diodes, transistors, and integrated circuits. It has the advantages of compact structure, reliability, high power efficiency and low cost, and has been widely used. As discrete components, they are already used in power devices, optical sensors and lamps, including solid-state lasers. They have a wide range of current and voltage handling capabilities, and more importantly, they are suitable for integration into complex microelectronic circuits. In the foreseeable future, it will become a key element of most electronic systems, serving communications, signal processing, computing and control applications in consumer and industrial markets.

The conductivity of semiconductors can be controlled, ranging from insulators to a few ohms. The importance of semiconductors is huge, both from the perspective of technology and economic development. Today, most electronic products, such as computers, cell phones, or digital recorders, are closely related to semiconductors, which are widely used in cell phones, computers, automobiles, meters, and temperature measurement.

Semiconductor material

Solid materials can generally be divided into the following three categories: insulators, semiconductors and conductors. (At low temperatures some conductors, semiconductors, and insulators may have become superconductors.) This is only a brief introduction, click on the students to read and learn about the detailed analysis of semiconductor materials in China, "the first generation, the second generation, the third generation, the fourth generation of semiconductor materials as classification".

Conductivity of semiconductor materials

The electrical conductivity σ (and the corresponding resistivity ρ = 1/σ) of some important materials are given. You can see that insulators like glass have low conductivity, while conductive materials like aluminum have high conductivity. Semiconductor materials such as silicon and gallium have electrical conductivity in between and are usually sensitive to temperature, light, magnetic fields, and a small number of impurity atoms. For example, adding about 10 boron atoms (called dopants) to every million silicon atoms can increase its electrical conductivity by a factor of a thousand.

What is a semiconductor? Understand semiconductor characteristics and industry classifications

Common semiconductor materials include silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide. Among many semiconductor materials, pure silicon is the most important material in integrated circuit applications and the most influential material in commercial applications. Figure 2 shows the purified silicon ingot.

Five characteristics of semiconductors

Doping (in a semiconductor with a crystal structure, artificially doping specific impurity elements, the conductivity is controlled),

Heat sensitivity,

Photosensitivity (marked change in electrical conductivity under conditions of light and thermal radiation information),

Negative resistivity temperature characteristic,

Rectification characteristics.

Semiconductor industry

The so-called semiconductor industry refers to the production of semiconductor products, such as integrated circuit devices, discrete devices, optoelectronic semiconductors, logic integrated circuits, analog integrated circuits, memory and so on. In addition, there is a classification of application areas, design methods, although not commonly used, but still according to IC, LSI, VLSI (very large LSI) and size classification method. In addition, according to the signal processing, it can be divided into analog, digital, analog-digital mixing and function classification methods.

Conductors, insulators and semiconductors

When the current passes through different objects, different objects have different resistance to the passage of the current, some objects can make the current pass smoothly, some objects do not let the current pass, or have a certain resistance to let the current pass. The ability of this different object to pass an electric current is called the conductivity of this object.

All kinds of objects have different electrical conductivity. All objects that conduct electricity well are called conductors, such as silver, copper, aluminum, lead, tin, iron, mercury, carbon, and electrolytes. On the contrary, ceramics, wood, rubber and other objects with poor electrical conductivity are called insulators; In addition, some objects are less conductive than conductors, but stronger than insulators. This conductor is called a semiconductor, such as silicon, germanium and other commonly used transistor raw materials.

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