Using Silicon - microchips and semiconductors

by g2525 (student)

Silicon - microchips and semiconductors

The macromolecule I have chosen is silicon. Silicon has four electrons in its valence shell, this allow them to form crystals, the four electron covalently bonds with four neighboring atoms creating a lattice. Electricity involves the flow of electrons, but all the outer electrons in a silicon crystal are involved in covalent bonds, pure silicon crystal is nearly an insulator, this is because the outer electrons can’t move around. (Wikipedia Contributors, 2012)(Brain, 2004) Silicon is a semiconductor because of its electrical conductivity being between that of an insulator and a conductor. For silicon to become more conductive we ‘dope’ the silicon, the procedure is known as ‘doping’. In doping, we mix small amount of impurity into silicon crystal. There are two types of impurities - N-type and P-type. N-type doping involve adding phosphorus or arsenic in small quantities, phosphorus and arsenic each have five electrons in the valence shell, when bonded to a silicon lattice the fifth electron has nothing to bond to, so it’s free to move around. P-type doping involving adding boron or gallium to silicon, boron and gallium both only have three electron in the valence shell. When added into a silicon lattice they create ‘holes’ in the lattice where a silicon electron has nothing to bond to.(Brain, 2001)

A diode is the most basic semiconductor device and it consist of putting P-type and N-type silicon together. A diode only allow current to flow in one direction and not the other. A transistor is a more advance version of diode, instead of using two layers it uses three, in one of these configuration NPN or PNP sandwich. When applying a small current to the center layer of the sandwich, a larger current can flow through the sandwich, this gives a transistor its switching behavior.(Brain, 2001) The larger current oscillate between on and off when the small current is present. Modern microchip contain thousands upon thousands of tiny transistor packed closely together, they work by having the transistor oscillate between on and off which in terms can be translated to binary language, off equals 0 and on equals 1.(Chandler, 2001) Current CPU contain roughly around 1 billion transistor.(Intel, 2012) With binary language we can use it to compile even more complicated language and also do calculations. Computers can help us do complicated calculation that would take us human months to figure out while computers can accomplish the task in a matter of hours.

The discovery of semiconductor and transistor was a huge benefit from the economic, social, environmental, and scientific advancement standpoint. The semiconductor industry consist of companies engaged in design and fabrication of semiconductor devices. It is currently one of the largest market, estimated to be around 304 billion and growing rapidly.(Wikipedia Contributors, 2012)

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From the social standpoint the semiconductor industry provide millions of job worldwide ranging from R&D to salesperson. Without the discovery of transistor, computers would still be the size of a house operating off vacuum tubes instead of transistors and microchips, iPhone, Mac, iPad, and tablets would not be possible as these devices are all based off of semiconductor.(Bellis, n.d) The society as we know it would not exist, there won’t be people staring at their phone on the train, we won’t have computer at school because they would be too big and expensive to bring to school. On the negative aspect technology might be making people ‘dumber’, for example in math class everyone’s required to have a calculator, our ability to do mental calculation might be poorer than those of the previous generation as we’re offloading more calculation to the computer. Another example would be the use of spellcheck on the daily bases.

From the environmental standpoint semiconductors are also very crucial. LEDs, currently the most efficient way of producing illumination on the market are in fact made out of semiconductors - diode.(Harris, 2002) Computer does exist before the time semiconductor become widespread, but they’re made out of vacuum tube which is very fragile and energy intensive. If all modern computer were replace by their vacuum tube counterpart our world energy consumption would be exponentially higher then that of today. All electronic you can see right now are all made out of semiconductors.

In 1958, the last supercomputer using vacuum tube was build, known as AN/FSQ-7. Total of 25 of these machine were, they’re used for monitoring the air defense network in the US, each of these machine compute at 0.024MIPS (million instruction per second).(Morris, 2009) Three years later the first fully transistorized supercomputer known as IBM 7030 Stretch clocked in at 1.2 MIPS and consuming much less power(21.6 KW compare to AN/FSQ-7’s 1.5MW).(Smith, 2009) This is a clear example of the benefit from moving to transistor based computer, much more efficient and a lot smaller.

Computer are everywhere, airplane, spacecraft, medical equipment, power grid, data center etc. Although they’re very efficient compare to vacuum tube based computer, they release a large amount of waste heat. For example 90% of the power provided to a datacenter are use for powering air conditioning unit to cool down the equipment. One major limitation of semiconductor based technology is that it’s prone to EMP (electromagnetic pulse), if earth was to get hit by the shockwave of a coronal mass ejection, all satellite, radio station, electrical transmission line would fail and result in chaos and long lasting power outages.(Vergano, 2010) Transistor are nearing the end of usefulness, in about a decade time we’ll be reaching the physical limit of silicon based transistor.(Wikipedia Contributors, 2012) Transistor around 4 nm would be effect by quantum physics thus the need of finding other material with better property than silicon based semiconductor. One of the candidate is synthesized blue diamond. Current obstacle of using synthetic blue diamond is with the difficulty of mass fabrication.

Word Count: 963

Bibliography

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IntelÂ® 22nm Technology. (n.d.). Ultrabook, SmartPhone, Laptop, Desktop, Server & Embeddedâ€“ Intel. Retrieved May 31, 2012, from

Chandler, N. (n.d.). HowStuffWorks "Transistors and the Computer Age". HowStuffWorks "Electronics". Retrieved May 31, 2012, from

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Harris, T. (n.d.). HowStuffWorks "How Light Emitting Diodes Work". HowStuffWorks "Electronics". Retrieved May 31, 2012, from

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parts., U. a. (n.d.). IBM Stretch (aka IBM 7030 Data Processing System). Brouhaha.com. Retrieved May 31, 2012, from

Vergano, D., & TODAY, U. (n.d.). One EMP burst and the world goes dark - USATODAY.com. News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World - USATODAY.com. Retrieved May 31, 2012, from

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Using Silicon - microchips and semiconductors

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