About Semiconductors

ABOUT SEMICONDUCTORS

About Semiconductors

A semiconductor device, is an electronic circuit component made from a material that is neither a good conductor nor a good insulator (hence semiconductor). Such devices have found wide applications because of their compactness, reliability, and low cost. As discrete components, they have found use in power devices, optical sensors, and light emitters, including solid-state lasers. More importantly, semiconductor devices lend themselves to integration into complex but readily manufacturable microelectronic circuits. They are, and will be in the foreseeable future, the key elements for the majority of electronic systems, including communications, consumer, data-processing, and industrial-control equipment.

A semiconductor is a material which has electrical conductivity to a degree between that of a metal (such as copper) and that of an insulator (such as glass). Semiconductors are the foundation of modern solid state electronics, including transistors, solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), quantum dots and digital and analog integrated circuits.

A semiconductor may have a number of unique properties, one of which is the ability to change conductivity by the addition of impurities ("doping") or by interaction with another phenomenon, such as an electric field or light; this ability makes a semiconductor very useful for constructing a device that can amplify, switch, or convert an energy input. The modern understanding of the properties of a semiconductor relies on quantum physics to explain the movement of electrons inside a lattice of atoms.

Most common semiconducting materials are crystalline solids, but amorphous and liquid semiconductors are also known. These compounds share with better known semiconductors the properties of intermediate conductivity and a rapid variation of conductivity with temperature, as well as occasional negative resistance. Such disordered materials lack the rigid crystalline structure of conventional semiconductors such as silicon. They are generally used in thin film structures, which do not require material of higher electronic quality, being relatively insensitive to impurities and radiation damage.

Semiconductor. (2013, September 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:49, September 28, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semiconductor&oldid=574882243