Silicon as a semiconductor

Conducting (conjugated) polymers have a unique set of properties The electronic properties of metals and semiconductors and the processing advantages and mechanical properties of polymers. It is the and that makes conducting polymers special materials. There are, after all, many excellent metals for example, copper, nickel, silver and gold, to name but a few. Similarly, there are many excellent semiconductors. Indeed, the sophisticated modem electronics industry uses silicon as the semiconductor of choice. It would be difficult to improve on the quality of copper as a metal or silicon as a semiconductor. 

The attractiveness of silicon as a semiconductor material for ICs derives in part from the feet that this important material forms a naturally insulating surface oxide. Use is made of this fact, for example, in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors (FET), where the oxide serves as the gate insulator. No such naturally insulating oxide occurs with any of the compound semiconductors that offer improved performance over silicon in many device apphcations. Roberts et al. (38) demonstrated the feasibiUty of such metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structures as FETs and chemical sensors shown schematically in Figure 1.23. These researchers... 

At the turn of the century the cost of elemental silicon was 1600/lb. Improvement of reduction conditions allowed this price to fall to 0.10/lb by 1931 and made the use of the element more practical. Elemental silicon is employed as an additive to iron to give silicon-steels, which are more acid resistant, to alloy copper for production of silicon bronzes and as an additive to aluminum or magnesium to improve the strength of these structural materials and provide resistance to corrosion. The use of silicon as a semiconductor had begun by 1940 and after discovery of the direct process reaction became the necessary starting point for the production of silicone polymers103. 

A short discussion of the bonding in small silicon clusters will demonstrate how the TSH framework may be useful in considering the structures of less familiar molecules. These species have received much attention in recent years, partly because of the technological significance of silicon as a semiconductor. Calculational strategies fall into two camps, namely, ab initio quantum mechanical treatments of some kind and analyses that employ analytic empirical atom-atom potentials. ... 

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See also in sourсe #XX -- [ ]

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