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In the foreseeable future, monocrystalline silicon is still the material of choice for the electronics industry, but gallium arsenide, the new star of the semiconductor family, has...

What is the role of semiconductor materials?

In the foreseeable future, monocrystalline silicon is still the material of choice for the electronics industry, but gallium arsenide, the new star of the semiconductor family, has rapidly grown into an important semiconductor electronic material second only to silicon. Gallium arsenide plays an important role in the contemporary optoelectronics industry, 50% of its products are used in military and aerospace applications, 30% are used in communications, and the rest are used in computers and test instruments. The special structure of gallium arsenide material makes it have excellent attractive characteristics. According to the principle of quantum mechanics, the smaller the effective mass of the electron, the faster it will move, and the effective mass of the electron in gallium arsenide is 1\/15 of the mass of the free electron, and only 1\/3 of the silicon electron. Transistors made of gallium arsenide switch between one and four times faster than silicon transistors, allowing faster and more powerful computers to be built. Because of the high electron motion speed of gallium arsenide, it can be used to prepare microwave devices with operating frequencies as high as 1010 Hertz, which plays a key role in satellite data transmission, communications, military electronics and so on. In fact, the III-IV group semiconductors represented by gallium arsenide are most characterized by their photoelectric characteristics, that is, in the case of light or applied electric field, electrons are excited to release light energy. Its light emission efficiency is higher than other semiconductor materials, and it can not only make light-emitting diodes, light detectors, but also semiconductor lasers, which are widely used in optical communications, optical computers and space technology, and the development prospects are encouraging. Like any semiconductor material, gallium arsenide materials are sensitive to impurity elements and must be refined. Unlike elemental semiconductors such as silicon and germanium, it also needs to ensure an accurate chemical ratio, otherwise it will affect the electrical properties of the material. Due to the above reasons, the preparation process of gallium arsenide single crystal is complicated and costly. The growth of gallium arsenide single crystal by microgravity on satellite has been achieved successfully in China. Besides. Thin film epitaxial growth technology, which can accurately control the thickness and resistivity of single crystal thin films, has been paid more and more attention in the preparation of semiconductor materials and devices. In just over a decade, more than 1,000 gallium arsenide products have been researched and developed in the United States alone. According to the prediction of the International Gallium Arsenide Integrated Circuit Conference in the late 1990s, the market sales of gallium arsenide integrated circuits will double every year, forming a scale of billions of dollars. Gallium arsenide and its representative ⅲ-ⅳ compound semiconductor family have unique skills and need to be further developed.