GaAs material analysis
1. The study of compound semiconductor materials can be traced back to the beginning of the last century. The earliest reported inP materials studied by Thiel et al. in 1910. In 1952, German scientist Welker first studied III-V compounds as a new semiconductor family and pointed out that they have superior properties not possessed by elemental semiconductor materials such as Ge and Si. Over the past fifty years, research on compound semiconductor materials has made great progress, and it has also been widely used in the fields of microelectronics and optoelectronics.
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) materials are currently the most abundant, widely used, and therefore the most important compound semiconductor materials, and the most important semiconductor materials after silicon. Due to its superior performance and band structure, GaAs materials have great potential in microwave devices and light-emitting devices. At present, the advanced production technology of gallium arsenide materials is still in the hands of major international companies such as Japan, Germany and the United States. Compared with foreign companies, domestic enterprises still have a large gap in the production technology of gallium arsenide materials.
2. Properties and uses of gallium arsenide materials
Gallium arsenide is a typical direct transition type energy band structure. The minimum value of the conduction band and the maximum value of the valence band are at the center of the Brillouin zone, that is, k=0, which makes it have high electro-optical conversion efficiency. An excellent material for preparing photovoltaic devices.
At 300K, the forbidden band width of GaAs material is 1.42V, which is much larger than 0.67V of germanium and 1.12V of silicon. Therefore, gallium arsenide devices can work at higher temperatures and withstand Big power.
Compared with traditional silicon semiconductor materials, gallium arsenide (GaAs) materials have high electron mobility, large forbidden band width, direct band gap, low power consumption, and the electron mobility is about 5.7 times that of silicon materials. Therefore, it is widely used in the manufacture of IC devices in high frequency and wireless communication. The high-frequency, high-speed, radiation-proof high-temperature devices produced are generally used in the fields of wireless communication, optical fiber communication, mobile communication, GPS global navigation, and the like. In addition to accidental application in IC products, GaAs materials can also be added to other elements to change their band structure to produce photoelectric effect, to make semiconductor light-emitting devices, and to make gallium arsenide solar cells.