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Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula SiO 2, commonly found in nature as quartz. [5] [6] In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is one of the most complex and abundant families of materials, existing as a compound of several minerals and as a synthetic product.
In microelectronic components such as transistors and ICs, the silicon material is normally a conductor because of doping, but it can easily be selectively transformed into a good insulator by the application of heat and oxygen. Oxidised silicon is quartz, i.e. silicon dioxide, the primary component of glass.
Silicon wafers were first introduced in the 1940s. [19] [20] There is a combination of processes that are used to prepare semiconducting materials for ICs. One process is called thermal oxidation, which forms silicon dioxide on the surface of the silicon. This is used as a gate insulator and field oxide.
Dielectric films tend to exhibit greater dielectric strength than thicker samples of the same material. For instance, the dielectric strength of silicon dioxide films of thickness around 1 μm is about 0.5 GV/m. [3] However very thin layers (below, say, 100 nm) become partially conductive because of electron tunneling.
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).
Doping of a pure silicon array. Silicon based intrinsic semiconductor becomes extrinsic when impurities such as boron and antimony are introduced.. In semiconductor production, doping is the intentional introduction of impurities into an intrinsic (undoped) semiconductor for the purpose of modulating its electrical, optical and structural properties.
Gate oxide at NPNP transistor made by Frosch and Derrick, 1957 [1]. The gate oxide is the dielectric layer that separates the gate terminal of a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) from the underlying source and drain terminals as well as the conductive channel that connects source and drain when the transistor is turned on.
Crystalline bulk silicon is rather inert, but becomes more reactive at high temperatures. Like its neighbour aluminium, silicon forms a thin, continuous surface layer of silicon dioxide (SiO 2) that protects the material beneath from oxidation. Because of this, silicon does not measurably react with the air below 900 °C.