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Silicon is a chemical element; it has symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic table: carbon is above it; and germanium, tin, lead, and flerovium are below it. It is relatively unreactive.
The chemical elements can be broadly divided into metals, metalloids, and nonmetals according to their shared physical and chemical properties.All elemental metals have a shiny appearance (at least when freshly polished); are good conductors of heat and electricity; form alloys with other metallic elements; and have at least one basic oxide.
As a metalloid the chemistry of silicon is largely covalent in nature, noting it can form alloys with metals such as iron and copper. The common oxide of silicon (SiO 2) is weakly acidic. Germanium. Germanium is a shiny, mostly unreactive grey-white solid with a density of 5.323 g/cm 3 (about two-thirds that of iron), and is hard (MH 6.0) and ...
Silicon is a semiconductor with an electrical conductivity of 10 −4 S•cm −1 [287] and a band gap of about 1.11 eV. [281] When it melts, silicon becomes a reasonable metal [ 288 ] with an electrical conductivity of 1.0–1.3 × 10 4 S•cm −1 , similar to that of liquid mercury.
Unless otherwise noted, this article describes the stable form of an element at standard temperature and pressure (STP). [b]While arsenic (here sealed in a container to prevent tarnishing) has a shiny appearance and is a reasonable conductor of heat and electricity, it is soft and brittle and its chemistry is predominately nonmetallic.
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Conversely, silicon is robust, cheap, and easy to process, whereas GaAs is brittle and expensive, and insulation layers cannot be created by just growing an oxide layer; GaAs is therefore used only where silicon is not sufficient. [2] By alloying multiple compounds, some semiconductor materials are tunable, e.g., in band gap or lattice constant ...