What is a Semiconductor Diodes ?

What is a Semiconductor Diodes ?

It is now some 50 years since the first transistor was introduced on December 23,

1947. For those of us who experienced the change from glass envelope tubes to the

solid-state era, it still seems like a few short years ago. The first edition of this text

contained heavy coverage of tubes, with succeeding editions involving the important

decision of how much coverage should be dedicated to tubes and how much to semi-

conductor devices. It no longer seems valid to mention tubes at all or to compare the

advantages of one over the other—we are firmly in the solid-state era.

                       

Semiconductor Diode

Diode

                        The miniaturization that has resulted leaves us to wonder about its limits. Complete systems now appear on wafers thousands of times smaller than the single element of earlier networks. New designs and systems surface weekly. The engineer becomes more and more limited in his or her knowledge of the broad range of advances

it is difficult enough simply to stay abreast of the changes in one area of research or

development. We have also reached a point at which the primary purpose of the container is simply to provide some means of handling the device or system and to provide a mechanism for attachment to the remainder of the network. Miniaturization

appears to be limited by three factors (each of which will be addressed in this text):

the quality of the semiconductor material itself, the network design technique, and

the limits of the manufacturing and processing equipment.