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A few of the properties of semiconductor materials were observed throughout the mid-19th and first decades of the 20th century. The first practical application of semiconductors in electronics was the 1904 development of the cat's-whisker detector, a primitive semiconductor diode used in early radio receivers.
A compound semiconductor is a semiconductor compound composed of chemical elements of at least two different species. These semiconductors form for example in periodic table groups 13–15 (old groups III–V), for example of elements from the Boron group (old group III, boron, aluminium, gallium, indium) and from group 15 (old group V, nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, bismuth).
A semiconductor device is an electronic component that relies on the electronic properties of a semiconductor material (primarily silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide, as well as organic semiconductors) for its function. Its conductivity lies between conductors and insulators. Semiconductor devices have replaced vacuum tubes in
A semiconductor diode, the most commonly used type today, is a crystalline piece of semiconductor material with a p–n junction connected to two electrical terminals. [5] It has an exponential current–voltage characteristic. Semiconductor diodes were the first semiconductor electronic devices.
The semiconductor industry is the aggregate of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits. Its roots can be traced to the invention of the transistor by Shockley , Brattain , and Bardeen at Bell Labs in 1948.
The term solid-state became popular at the beginning of the semiconductor era in the 1960s to distinguish this new technology. A semiconductor device works by controlling an electric current consisting of electrons or holes moving within a solid crystalline piece of semiconducting material such as silicon, while the thermionic vacuum tubes it replaced worked by controlling a current of ...
In electronics, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) [1] is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si, silicium), used for the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in photovoltaics, to manufacture solar cells. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and upon the wafer.
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuits (ICs) such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories (such as RAM and flash memory).