Silicon, From Sand to Chips, Volume 2 E-Book

Alain Vignes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 215

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Silicon is the material of the digital revolution, of solar energy and of digital photography, which has revolutionized both astronomy and medical imaging. It is also the material of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), indispensable components of smart objects. The discovery of the electronic and optoelectronic properties of germanium and silicon during the Second World War, followed by the invention of the transistor, ushered in the digital age. Although the first transistors were made from germanium, silicon eventually became the preferred material for these technologies. Silicon, From Sand to Chips 2 traces the history of the discoveries, inventions and developments in basic components and chips that these two materials enabled one after the other. The book is divided into two volumes and this second volume is devoted to microelectronic and optoelectronic chips, solar cells and MEMS.

Leseprobe

Silicon, From Sand to Chips 2

Microelectronic Chips, Solar Cells, MEMS

Alain Vignes

First published 2024 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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© ISTE Ltd 2024The rights of Alain Vignes to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950584

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78630-922-8

Preface

At the beginning of the 20st century, silicon “metal” was used as an alloying element for steels with electrical properties. The year 1906 saw the first application of crystalline silicon as a component of electromagnetic wave detection circuits in radio receivers, competing with galena.

Research carried out during the Second World War on silicon and germanium, the materials used in the components (point-contact diodes) of radar receiver circuits for aircraft detection and tracking, revealed that these materials are semiconductors whose basic characteristic is the control of electrical conductivity through doping. This characteristic prompted the search, after the Second World War, for solid components to replace “triodes” (vacuum tubes). This quickly led to the invention of the transistor.

The invention of the transistor is the founding act of the digital revolution (of the information society in which we live).

Germanium then silicon are the first two materials that enabled the invention of the transistor and the initial development of computers, while silicon dethroned germanium to produce the “MOSFET” (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), the basic component of integrated circuits: microprocessors and memories, the building blocks of computers.

But these components require materials (germanium and silicon) of extraordinary purity and perfect crystallinity. The purification of basic materials to purities of up to 11N, the production of single crystals of germanium, then silicon, the manufacture of components (based on transistors) and their miniaturization have posed problems of a complexity rarely encountered in the development of manufactured products.

These are the same properties and characteristics that have made silicon the material of choice for converting solar energy into electricity and for photographic sensors.

Silicon’s exceptional mechanical properties, combined with its electrical properties, make it the material of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), the key components of “intelligent objects”.

In 2018, there were no materials on the horizon that were likely to dethrone silicon as the material of choice for microelectronics and optoelectronics alike. According to Gérard Berry: “Silicon is not dead, far from it”.

This book is aimed at readers who want to know and understand how it was possible to go from the ENIAC computer, built during the Second World War, to calculate shell trajectories, 30 m long and 2 m high, with 17,468 triodes (vacuum tubes) and capable of executing 5,000 additions and subtractions in 1 s, to centimetric microprocessors with 20 billion transistors, processing power (number of instructions processed per second) of several gigahertz, making up the basic components of the individual computer, which is the size of a thin book.

To this end, this book, by tracing the history of discoveries, inventions, innovations and technological developments in materials, components, integrated circuits and memories, presenting the physical bases of their operation, and focusing on the materials and technologies used to make these components, attempts to answer the following questions:

What specific properties (characteristics) – electrical, physicochemical, mechanical – are behind the successive dominance of silicon, then germanium, then silicon again in the development of microelectronics, the dominance of silicon in the conversion of solar energy into electricity, the dominance of silicon as the basic material for electromechanical microsystems?

What properties (purity, crystallinity, doping) had to be imparted to the material, and how were they obtained to achieve the performance achieved by these components today?

What processes had to be developed to produce these components, and then to meet the demands of miniaturization, enabling the high-speed data processing performance we are seeing today, efficient conversion of solar energy into electricity, etc.?

Who were the architects of this epic? According to Gérard Berry

1

, “its extraordinary success (that of silicon) is clearly to the credit of semiconductor materials physicists, who made technological advances that required enormous imagination and skill to overcome all the obstacles”.

Until 1942, silicon extracted from silica (SiO2) and germanium extracted from sulfide (GeS2) were considered as metals. The semiconductors known at the time were chemical compounds: oxides (Cu2O) and sulfides (galena PbS), composed of a metal and a metalloid (oxygen or sulfur), whose basic characteristic was the increasing variation of their conductivity with temperature, whereas the conductivity of metals decreases with increasing temperature. It was not until the summer of 1942 that it was recognized that purified silicon and germanium were not metals, but semiconductors.

This book is divided into two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to basic components (diodes and transistors).

Chapter 1 presents (1) the work that led to the extraction of silicon from silica and its purification and the discovery, extraction and purification of germanium; (2) the basic physical characteristics of semiconductors made from these two materials, knowledge of which is essential for understanding how components work.

Chapters 2–6 of Volume 1 present the basic components (diodes, transistors) in the chronological order of their discovery/invention, and the technological developments required for their realization.

Each chapter includes a presentation of the component, how it works and its basic functions, followed by the history of the research and development that led to its invention and production. The physical basis of its operation is presented in the appendicies of each chapter. The technologies used to satisfy the requirements of purity and crystalline perfection of the base material are presented chronologically, as are the technologies used to produce the components and the evolutions required by their miniaturization. The industrial development of the first components is presented according to their importance for subsequent developments.

Volume 2 is devoted to “chips, optoelectronic components and MEMS”.

Chapters 1 and 2 present microcomputer integrated circuits and memories.

Chapter 3 presents the silicon thin film transistor TFT, which led to the development of flat-panel liquid crystal displays.

Chapters 4 and 5 present silicon optoelectronic components. These include solar cells for converting solar energy into electricity and photoelectric image sensors for digital cameras, which have revolutionized astronomy and medical imaging.

Chapter 6 presents microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), the exceptional mechanical properties of silicon that have enabled their development, and the specific technologies developed for building structures with moving parts.

Many English and American books present the “history of semiconductors”. Compared with the reference works cited in the reference lists, this book presents not only the historical aspects, but also the recent technological developments that have enabled the current performance of microprocessors, memories, solar cells and electromechanical microsystems. The book is based on numerous works by historians and original publications.

The author would particularly like to thank Professors Jean Philibert and André Pineau.

January 2024

References

Burgess, P.D. (n.d.). Transistor history [Online]. Available at:

https://sites.google.com/site/transistorhistory

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Computer History Museum (n.d.). The silicon engine timeline [Online]. Available at:

www.computerhistory.org

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Hu, C. (2009).

Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits.

Pearson, London.

Krakowiak, S. (2017). Éléments d’histoire de l’informatique. Working document, Université Grenoble Alpes & Aconit, CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 FR.

Lazard, E. and Mounier-Kuhn, P. (2022).

Histoire illustrée de l’informatique

. EDP Sciences, Les Ulis.

Lilen, H. (2019).

La belle histoire des révolutions numériques.

De Boeck Supérieur, Louvain-la-Neuve.

Lojek, B. (2007).

History of Semiconductor Engineering

. Springer, New York.

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Physique des semiconducteurs et des composants électroniques

, 6th edition. Dunod, Paris.

Nouet, P. (2015). Introduction to microelectronics technology. Working document, Polytech Montpellier, ERII4 M2 EEA Systèmes Microelectronics.

Orton, J.W. (2004).

The Story of Semiconductors

. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Orton, J.W. (2009).

Semiconductors and the Information Revolution: Magic Crystals that made IT Happen

. Elsevier, Amsterdam.

Riordan, M. and Hoddeson, L. (1997).

Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age

. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

Seitz, F. and Einspruch, N.G. (1998).

Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon

. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.

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Semiconductor Devices: Physics and Technology

. Wiley, New York.

Verroust, G. (1997). Histoire, épistémologie de l’informatique et révolution technologiques. Course summary, Université Paris VIII, Paris.

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transistormuseum.com

.

Note

1

Berry, G. (2017).

L’Hyperpuissance de l’informatique

. Odile Jacob, Paris, p. 88 and 401.

IntroductionThe Digital Revolution

The “digital revolution” is also known as the “computing or IT revolution”. These expressions reflect “a radical transformation of the world we are witnessing today”.

The first term refers to the binary digitization of texts and numbers, as well as images, sounds and videos, using sequences of symbols. This makes it possible to store images, sounds, etc., and transmit them, replicate them, analyze them and transform them using digital computers (Abiteboul and Dowek 2017, p. 29).

The second expression, “the computing revolution”, refers to the science and technique of processing digitized information using algorithms. According to Berry (2017, p. 25), “Computing is the conceptual and technical engine of the digital world. The computer is the physical engine”.

The “birth certificate of the digital revolution” is Claude Shannon’s 1937 master’s thesis, A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits (1938). This thesis relied on the theory of the Englishman George Boole (An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, 1847), which established the link between calculus and logic and where the basic logical functions “AND”, “OR” and “NOT” were treated as arithmetic operations, taking the value 0 or 1, depending on whether the proposition was true or false.

The master’s thesis of Claude Shannon1 was the result of an internship at Bell Labs2, where he observed the power of telephone exchange circuits that used electromechanical relays (switches)3 to route calls and imagined that electrical circuits could perform these logical operations using an on-off switch configuration.

The first demonstration of the feasibility of executing logic functions using a device made up of two electromechanical relays was carried out in 1937 by George Stibitz of Bell Labs; this led to the construction in 1939 of the first CNC (complex number calculator) (400 electromechanical relays), capable of opening and closing 20 times a second, executing complex number multiplication and division operations. This was followed by five other models. “Stibitz’s calculator demonstrated the potential of a relay circuit to do mathematics in binary, process information, and manipulate logical procedures” (Isaacson 2015, p. 93).

The “digital” revolution is the third major revolution in human history. The first was the agricultural revolution 8,000 years ago. The second was the “industrial revolution” of the 19th century.

The technology at the heart of this third revolution, also known as the “second industrial revolution”, is microelectronics4. In 1979, the US National Academy of Sciences published a report5 entitled “Microstructure, Science, Engineering and Technology”, which stated: “The modern era of electronics has ushered in a ‘second’ industrial revolution, the consequences of which may be even more profound than those of the first”. According to Ian Ross, President of Bell Labs from 1979 to 1991: “The semiconductor odyssey produced a revolution in our society at least as profound as the total industrial revolution. Today electronics pervades our lives and affects everything” (Ross 1997).

I.1. Microelectronics components

In 1903, Arthur Fleming invented the diode (vacuum tube), a current rectifier, and in 1906, Lee de Forest invented the triode (vacuum tube) by adding a grid between the diode’s cathode and anode. As well as rectifying the current, this allowed weak currents induced by electromagnetic waves to be amplified, hence the development of radio receivers: a small variation in the signal on the grid resulted in an amplification of the cathode-anode current. In addition, a sudden variation in the signal applied to the grid switched the triode on or off, enabling it to function as a switch. The triode is also capable of self-oscillation, hence its use in radio transmitters.

The invention of the bipolar transistor in 1948 by William Shockley (Nobel Prize winner), a solid-state device capable of performing the same functions (amplification of weak currents and switching), but much faster, ushered in the era of the digital revolution.

Like transistors, triodes work by controlling a current of electrons, which can either be amplified or interrupted and reignited. These components function like a switch that can be set to 0 or 1 on command, thus performing logic functions. But with triodes, switching times are much longer and the permissible frequencies much lower than in solid-state components, because these variables are linked to the time taken for the electrons to cross the distance between the cathode and the anode (around 1 mm); whereas, in a transistor, the distance traveled by the electrons between the emitter and the collector is less than 1 µm, down to around 20 nm.