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Properties and Growth of Semiconductors

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Semiconductor Physics

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Abstract

Semiconductor physics and devices have emerged from early studies on the conductivity of metal sulfides in the nineteenth century and experienced a strong progress since the middle of the twentieth century. This introductive chapter briefly highlights a couple of historic milestones and illustrates some general properties of semiconductors. Then the fabrication of semiconductors is described, pointing out the driving force of crystal growth, thermodynamics, and kinetics of nucleation and the occurrence of different growth modes. Various methods for growing bulk single crystals from the liquid and the vapor phase are introduced, and the techniques of liquid-phase epitaxy, molecular-beam epitaxy, and metalorganic vapor-phase epitaxy for the fabrication of thin layers and sharp interfaces are pointed out.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The word itself was rediscovered at this time. It was actually used much earlier (Ebert1789) in approximately the correct context, and then again 62 years later by Bromme (1851). However, even after its more recent introduction, serious doubts were voiced as to whether even today’s most prominent semiconductor, silicon, would not better be described as a metal (Wilson1931).

  2. 2.

    This age was also termed the silicon age (Queisser 1985), in reference to the material now most widely used for semiconducting devices. Despite the great abundance in the earth’s crust (27.5% surpassed only by oxygen with 50.5%, and followed by aluminum with 7.3% and iron with 3.4%), and its dominance as the material of choice in the semiconductor industry, other semiconductor materials (crystalline or amorphous) are now being identified which may show even greater potential in the future. The global semiconductor industry with a $304 billion market in 2010 (source: KPMG report, ~$321 billion in 2012) is a key driver for economic growth, with an annual (long-term) average growth on the order of 13%.

  3. 3.

    The resistance is used here rather than the material resistivity because of the inhomogeneity of the electronic transport through most of the devices.

  4. 4.

    G is used instead of U, because control of temperature T and pressure P is more convenient than that of the parameters entropy S and volume V.

  5. 5.

    The number of coexisting phases is specified by Gibbs phase rule.

  6. 6.

    The phenomenon should not be confused with the size effect of melting-point depression in nanoscale materials that originates from a large surface-to-volume ratio.

  7. 7.

    After completion of a step, a new kink must nucleate at the step for advancement, and after completion of an entire layer, a new (two-dimensional) nucleus with a step at its perimeter must be created. Particularly, the latter leads to a slow growth rate of flat surfaces.

  8. 8.

    A screw dislocation hitting a surface creates a steadily reproduced kink site at its core, enabling a spiral growth around the core that is much faster than growth on a planar surface. Under suitable conditions, a fine needle may form with an axial screw-dislocation line.

  9. 9.

    This feature is different from the related method of Kyropoulos (1926,1930), where crystallization proceeds by slowly cooling the melt, and the crystal grows into the melt.

  10. 10.

    The differentiation between physical and chemical process is often not well defined, and CVT is also used for closed systems.

  11. 11.

    Organic materials interesting for semiconductor applications are treated in Sect. 1.5 in chapter “The Structure of Semiconductors.”

  12. 12.

    For example, in MBE of GaAs, the sticking coefficient of As2,\( {s}_{{\mathrm{As}}_2} \), increases linearly with the (independent) Ga adsorption rate and reaches unity when flux(Ga) = 2 × flux(As2).

  13. 13.

    Similar to MBE

  14. 14.

    The difference in the maximum growth rates in Fig. 15 originates from effects of the reactor geometry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Naples, FL, USA

    Karl W. Böer

  2. Institut für Festkörperphysik, EW5-1, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Udo W. Pohl

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  1. Karl W. Böer
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Böer, K.W., Pohl, U.W. (2018). Properties and Growth of Semiconductors. In: Semiconductor Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69150-3_1

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