Early history of the physics and chemistry of semiconductors-from doubts to fact in a hundred years

Abstract

Gray (1731), Desagullier (1742) and Volta (1782) discovered and investigated electric conduction in solids. Davy (1821) found a decrease of the conductivity sigma in metals and Faraday (1833) observed a strong increase with temperature in a number of binary chemical compounds. Hittorf's (1851) measurements on Ag2S and Cu2S led to a linear relation of log sigma against 1/T. The controversial case of Ag2S is described. Hall (1879) and Rowland (1880) discovered a transverse voltage of a current carrying metal film in a magnetic field. Riecke (1901) and Drude (1900) developed the first electron theory of metals and Koenigsberger (1914) tried to explain the temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity by a dissociation theory. Baedeker (1908) was the first to observe semiconducting properties of CuI depending on the stoichiometric composition. Wagner (1933) proved that the conductivity of Ag2S is essentially electronic and not ionic. Gudden (1930) suggested that semiconduction is the result of impurities and imperfections in solids and Wagner and Schottky (1931) developed their theories of lattice defects (Fehlordnungs-Erscheinungen). Wilson (1931) presented the first band theory of intrinsic and extrinsic semiconductors. The existence of intrinsic conduction has been questioned by experimentalists and is verified only by the preparation and investigation of high-purity semiconducting elements.

Main Differences in Processing Si and SiC Devices

“…In 1930, Bernhard Gudden [4] was the first one to report that the electrical carriers of semiconductors are actually the impurities within their crystal lattices. If the impurity concentration is too high, the semiconductor becomes metallic, and if too low, more like an insulator.…”

100 years of semiconductor science

“…The author of a rather informative study on the "early history" of semiconductors, Georg Busch [1], stresses that the first scientist to use the word "semiconductors" was Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), in his report to the London Royal Society in 1782. By touching a charged electrometer with different materials, he discovered that contact with metals caused immediate discharge of the electrometer.…”

“…The situation changed after the fabrication of the first transistor on р-n-junctions (1951). William Shockley (1910-1989 together with his colleagues John Bardeen (1908Bardeen ( -1991 and Walter Brattain was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics 1956. The first chip including two transistors, resistor and several capacitors was fabricated from a 2 cm diameter silicon crystal in 1959.…”

Enrico Fermi in Florence [Historical corner]

“…Finally, the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1956 was awarded jointly to William B. Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter H. Brattain "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect" (Figure 8). Signifi cantly, the fi rst formula that Bardeen (Figure 9) showed at the Nobel Lecture was the Fermi-Dirac distribution [15,16].…”