The Ufa State Aviation Technical University
SEMICONDUCTORS
Harisov Azamat
Second-Year student
Department of AF
IMT-238
UFA 2007
Contents
Page
1. Semiconductors.………………………………………………….2
1.1 Overview……………………………………………………...2
1.2 Band structure…………………………………………….…..2
1.3 Energy-momentum dispersion………………….……….……3
1.4Carrier generation and recombination…………….….……….4
1.5 Doping…………………………………………….………….4
1.6 Dopants………………………………………….……………4
1.7Carrier concentration………………………………..…………5
1.8 Effect on band structure………………………………………5
1.9 Preparation of semiconductor materials…………......………..6
2. Полупроводники…………………………………….…………..7
2.1 Обзор полупроводников………………………...…………..7
2.2 Зонная структура………………………………...…………..8
2.3 Рассеивание импульс-энергии…………………....………...9
2.4 Получение и рекомбинация носителей заряда……...……..9
2.5 Легирование……………………………………………….....10
2.6 Легирующие элементы………………………………….…..10
2.7 Концентрация носителей заряда………………………..…..10
2.8 Эффект зонной структуры………………………..…………11
2.9 Изготовление полупроводниковых материалов…..……….11
3. Vocabulary………………………………………………………...13
4. Bibliography…………………………………………………….…15
Semiconductors
A semiconductor is a solid whose electrical conductivity is in between that of a conductor and that of an insulator, and can be controlled over a wide range, either permanently or dynamically. Semiconductors are tremendously important in technology. Semiconductor devices, electronic components made of semiconductor materials, are essential in modern electrical devices. Examples range from computers to cellular phones to digital audio players. Silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially, but dozens of other materials are used as well.
Overview
Semiconductors are very similar to insulators. The two categories of solids differ primarily in that insulators have larger band gaps — energies that electrons must acquire to be free to move from atom to atom. In semiconductors at room temperature, just as in insulators, very few electrons gain enough thermal energy to leap the band gap from the valence band to the conduction band, which is necessary for electrons to be available for electric current conduction. For this reason, pure semiconductors and insulators in the absence of applied electric fields, have roughly similar resistance. The smaller bandgaps of semiconductors, however, allow for other means besides temperature to control their electrical properties.
Semiconductors' intrinsic electrical properties are often permanently modified by introducing impurities by a process known as doping. Usually, it is sufficient to approximate that each impurity atom adds one electron or one "hole" that may flow freely. Upon the addition of a sufficiently large proportion of impurity dopants, semiconductors will conduct electricity nearly as well as metals. Depending on the kind of impurity, a doped region of semiconductor can have more electrons or holes, and is named N-type or P-type semiconductor material, respectively. Junctions between regions of N- and P-type semiconductors create electric fields, which cause electrons and holes to be available to move away from them, and this effect is critical to semiconductor device operation. Also, a density difference in the amount of impurities produces a small electric field in the region which is used to accelerate non-equilibrium electrons or holes.
In addition to permanent modification through doping, the resistance of semiconductors is normally modified dynamically by applying electric fields. The ability to control resistance/conductivity in regions of semiconductor material dynamically through the application of electric fields is the feature that makes semiconductors useful. It has led to the development of a broad range of semiconductor devices, like transistors and diodes. Semiconductor devices that have dynamically controllable conductivity, such as transistors, are the building blocks of integrated circuits devices like the microprocessor. These "active" semiconductor devices (transistors) are combined with passive components implemented from semiconductor material such as capacitors and resistors, to produce complete electronic circuits.
In most semiconductors, when electrons lose enough energy to fall from the conduction band to the valence band (the energy levels above and below the band gap), they often emit light, a quantum of energy in the visible electromagnetic spectrum. This photoemission process underlies the light-emitting diode (LED) and the semiconductor laser, both of which are very important commercially. Conversely, semiconductor absorption of light in photodetectors excites electrons to move from the valence band to the higher energy conduction band, thus facilitating detection of light and vary with its intensity. This is useful for fiber optic communications, and providing the basis for energy from solar cells.
Semiconductors may be elemental materials such as silicon and germanium, or compound semiconductors such as gallium arsenide and indium phosphide, or alloys such as silicon germanium or aluminium gallium arsenide.
Band structure
Like other solids, the electrons in semiconductors can have energies only within certain bands between the energy of the ground state, corresponding to electrons tightly bound to the atomic nuclei of the material, and the free electron energy, which is the energy required for an electron to escape entirely from the material. The energy bands each correspond to a large number of discrete quantum states of the electrons, and most of the states with low energy (closer to the nucleus) are full, up to a particular band called the valence band. Semiconductors and insulators are distinguished from metals because the valence band in the semiconductor materials is very nearly full under usual operating conditions, thus causing more electrons to be available in the conduction band.
The ease with which electrons in a semiconductor can be excited from the valence band to the conduction band depends on the band gap between the bands, and it is the size of this energy bandgap that serves as an arbitrary dividing line (roughly 4 eV) between semiconductors and insulators.
The electrons must move between states to conduct electric current, and so due to the Pauli exclusion principle full bands do not contribute to the electrical conductivity. However, as the temperature of a semiconductor rises above absolute zero, the range of energy values of the electrons in a given band are increased, and some electrons are likely to be found in with energy states of the conduction band, which is the band immediately above the valence band. The current-carrying electrons in the conduction band are known as "free electrons", although they are often simply called "electrons" if context allows this usage to be clear.
Electrons excited to the conduction band also leave behind electron holes, or unoccupied states in the valence band. Both the conduction band electrons and the valence band holes contribute to electrical conductivity. The holes themselves don't actually move, but a neighbouring electron can move to fill the hole, leaving a hole at the place it has just come from, and in this way the holes appear to move, and the holes behave as if they were actual positively charged particles.
One covalent bond between neighboring atoms in the solid is ten times stronger than the binding of the single electron to the atom, so freeing the electron does not imply to destroy the crystal structure.
The notion of holes, which was introduced for semiconductors, can also be applied to metals, where the Fermi level lies within the conduction band. With most metals the Hall effect reveals electrons to be the charge carriers, but some metals have a mostly filled conduction band, and the Hall effect reveals positive charge carriers, which are not the ion-cores, but holes. Contrast this to some conductors like solutions of salts, or plasma. In the case of a metal, only a small amount of energy is needed for the electrons to find other unoccupied states to move into, and hence for current to flow. Sometimes even in this case it may be said that a hole was left behind, to explain why the electron does not fall back to lower energies: It cannot find a hole. In the end in both materials electron-phonon scattering and defects are the dominant causes for resistance.
The energy distribution of the electrons determines which of the states are filled and which are empty. This distribution is described by Fermi-Dirac statistics. The distribution is characterized by the temperature of the electrons, and the Fermi energy or Fermi level. Under absolute zero conditions the Fermi energy can be thought of as the energy up to which available electron states are occupied. At higher temperatures, the Fermi energy is the energy at which the probability of a state being occupied has fallen to 0.5.
The dependence of the electron energy distribution on temperature also explains why the conductivity of a semiconductor has a strong temperature dependency, as a semiconductor operating at lower temperatures will have fewer available free electrons and holes able to do the work.
Energy–momentum dispersion
In the preceding description an important fact is ignored for the sake of simplicity: the dispersion of the energy. The reason that the energies of the states are broadened into a band is that the energy depends on the value of the wave vector, or k-vector, of the electron. The k-vector, in quantum mechanics, is the representation of the momentum of a particle.
The dispersion relationship determines the effective mass, m*, of electrons or holes in the semiconductor, according to the formula:
The effective mass is important as it affects many of the electrical properties of the semiconductor, such as the electron or hole mobility, which in turn influences the diffusivity of the charge carriers and the electrical conductivity of the semiconductor.
Typically the effective mass of electrons and holes are different. This affects the relative performance of p-channel and n-channel IGFETs.
The top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band might not occur at that same value of k. Materials with this situation, such as silicon and germanium, are known as indirect bandgap materials. Materials in which the band extrema are aligned in k, for example gallium arsenide, are called direct bandgap semiconductors. Direct gap semiconductors are particularly important in optoelectronics because they are much more efficient as light emitters than indirect gap materials.