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2024

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05

Semiconductor Industry's Expectations for High Quality Diamond


Semiconductor materials are a type of functional material with conductivity between conductive and insulating materials at room temperature. Its conductivity will significantly change with temperature, light exposure, and doping, especially doping can change the conductivity and type of semiconductor, which is the basic basis for its wide application in manufacturing various electronic components and integrated circuits.
1、 Characteristics of Semiconductor Materials
The characteristic parameters of semiconductor materials include bandgap width, resistivity, carrier mobility, non-equilibrium carrier lifetime, and dislocation density.
Band gap width: determined by the electronic state and atomic configuration of the semiconductor, reflecting the energy required for valence electrons in the atoms that make up this material to be excited from a bound state to a free state; The bandgap width is an important characteristic parameter of semiconductors. Metals have a zero bandgap, insulators have a large bandgap (usually greater than 4.5 eV), and semiconductors have a median bandgap.
Resistivity and carrier mobility: reflect the conductivity of the material;
Non equilibrium carrier lifetime: reflects the relaxation characteristics of internal carriers in semiconductor materials transitioning from non-equilibrium state to equilibrium state under external effects (such as light or electric field);
Dislocation density: used to measure the degree of lattice integrity of semiconductor single crystal materials.
The characteristic parameters of semiconductor materials can not only reflect the differences between semiconductor materials and other non semiconductor materials, but more importantly, they can reflect the quantitative differences in the characteristics of various semiconductor materials and even the same material in different situations.
As silicon-based electronic devices gradually approach their theoretical limits, research on wide and ultra wide bandgap semiconductor materials has become a new competitive hotspot in recent years. Gallium nitride, silicon carbide, and zinc oxide are all wide bandgap semiconductor materials because their bandgap width is above 3 electron volts, making it impossible to excite valence band electrons to the conduction band at room temperature. The working temperature of the device can be very high, for example, silicon carbide can work stably for a long time below 600 ℃.