Essay on Semiconductors The Silicon Chip

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Semiconductors : The Silicon Chip

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 Laboratories were

looking for a replacement for the vacuum tube. They began studying the

electrical properties of semiconductors which are non-metallic substances,

such as silicon, that are neither conductors of electricity, like metal,

nor insulators like wood, but whose electrical properties lie between these

extremes. By 1947 the transistor was invented. The Bell Labs research

team sought a way of directly altering the electrical properties of

semiconductor material. They learned they could change and control these

properties by "doping" the semiconductor, or infusing it with selected

elements, heated to a gaseous phase. When the semiconductor was also

heated, atoms from the gases would seep into it and modify its pure,

crystal structure by displacing some atoms. Because these dopant atoms had

different amount of electrons than the semiconductor atoms, they formed

conductive paths. If the dopant atoms had more electrons than the

semiconductor atoms, the doped regions were called n-type to signify and

excess of negative charge. Less electrons, or an excess of positive charge,

created p-type regions. By allowing this dopant to take place in carefully

delineated areas on the surface of the semiconductor, p-type regions could

be created within n-type regions, and vice-versa. The transistor was much

smaller than the vacuum tube, did not get very hot, and did not require a

headed filament that would eventually burn out.

Finally in 1958, integrated circuits were invented. By the mid 1950's,

the first commercial transistors were being shipped. However research

continued. The scientist began to think that if one transistor could be

built within one solid piece of semiconductor material, why not multiple

transistors or even an entire circuit. With in a few years this

speculation became one solid piece of material. These integrated

circuits(ICs) reduced the number of electrical interconnections required in

a piece of electronic equipment, thus increasing reliability and speed. In

contrast, the first digital electronic computer built with 18,000 vacuum

tubes and weighed 50 tons, cost about 1 million, required 140 kilowatts of

power, and occupied an entire room. Today, a complete computer, fabricated

within a single piece of silicon the...

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