What is an epitaxial transistor?

Epitaxial transistor is a predecessor for many modern semiconductor devices. The standard transistor uses three pieces of semiconductor material connected directly. Epitaxial transistors are like a standard transistor, except that they have a very thin film layer of pure, non -offered semiconductor material stored between transistor sections to insulate them. This significantly improves the speed and performance of the device. Silicon for these pieces is mixed with an ingredient that gives them an electric charge. In the NPN transistor, the industry standard, two pieces are negatively charged, while the third is positively charged.

For the construction of the transistor, three pieces of silicon are associated with a positive piece sandwiched between two negatively charged pieces. Once these pieces are connected together, Electrons exchange occurs in two places where pieces meet, called intersections. Electron replacement continues in intersections until the balance between negative and position is metby tight hubs. After the balance of electric cartridges, these two areas no longer have any charge at all and are called depletion regions.

Exhaustion areas in the transistor determine many operational characteristics of equipment, such as how quickly the device can change states called switching and at which voltage the device will perform or fail, is called failure or avalanche voltage. Since the method of creating depletion areas in standard transistors is naturally happening, they are not optimally accurate and cannot be controlled to improve or change their physical structure, except for changing the power of the charge originally added to silicon. For years, Germani transistors had excellent switching speed compared to silicon transistors simply because the Germanic semiconductor tended to naturally create stricter areas of exhaustion.

in 1951 created Howard Christensen and GordHe from Bell Labs technology, which we have now called an epitaxial deposition. This technology, as the name suggests, could store a very thin film or a layer of material on the substrate of the same material. In 1960, Henry Theurer led the Bell team, which improved the use of epitaxial deposition for silicone semiconductors.

This new approach to transistor construction has forever changed semiconductor devices. Instead of relying on the natural tendencies of silicon to create depletion areas of the transistor, technology could add very thin layers of pure, non -offered silicon that would act as an area of ​​exhaustion. This process provided designers with accurate control of the operating characteristics of silicon transistors, and for the first time the cost -effective silicon transistors became superior in all of them.

with the perfect process of epitaxial deposition created the Bell team the first epitax transistor that the company pushed into immediate service in its telEphonic switching devices, which improved both the speed and reliability of the system. Fairchild Semiconductors, impressed the performance of the epitax transistor, began working on his own epitaxial transistor, the legendary 2n914. In 1961 it released the equipment on the market and remained widely used.

After the release of Fairchild, other companies such as Sylvania, Motorola and Texas Instruments began to work on their own epitaxial transistors, and the silicone age of electronics was born. Due to the success of the epitaxial deposition in the creation of transistors and silicone devices, engineers generally sought further use for this technology and soon was put into work with other materials such as metal oxides. Direct descendants of the epitaxial transistor almost existently advanced electronic devices can be imagined: flat screens, CCD digital camera, mobile phones, integrated circuits, computer processors, memory chips, solar cells and countlessThe centers that form the foundations of all modern technological systems.