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Semiconductors
Silicon is the raw material most often used in
integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. It is the second
most abundant substance on the earth. It is
extracted from rocks and common beach sand
and put through an exhaustive purification process.
In this form, silicon is the purist industrial
substance that man produces, with impurities
comprising less than one part in a billion. That is
the equivalent of one tennis ball in a string of golf
balls stretching from the earth to the moon.
Semiconductors are usually materials which have
energy-band gaps smaller than 2eV. An important
property of semiconductors is the ability to change
their resistivity over several orders of magnitude
by doping.
Approximate words: 1459
Approximate pages: 6
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