Electronics I

16.365
Prof. Joel Therrien Ball Hall 319

What will be covered

Amplifiers, Diodes, and Transistors: theory and applications These devices will be studied on four levels:
Device Physics Current-Voltage Characteristics Device Biasing & Small Signal Operation Functional Circuits

Practical applications of amplifiers (Design project)

Important Info
Course Website http://faculty.uml.edu/jtherrien (go to courses) Office Hours Monday 12:30-2 Wednesday 12:30-2 IM (j-therrien@hotmail.com) But dont send email to there, I dont check it very often at all, use Joel_Therrien@uml.edu instead

Operation: Eliminate Troll

The service project for this semester involves retrofitting the lock on the Lowell canal. Boat guide cant open the lock so they need a person on the bank there to open it. We will replace this setup with a remote control lock opener Details are in the syllabus

Semiconductors

Physics of Semiconductors
Semiconductors are a class of materials that have unique properties, somewhere between that of a conductor like gold and that of an insulator, like glass (which is why the are called semi-conductors) The nature of their properties lies in the unique way that electrons behave inside them. Now there are many kinds of semiconductors, but we will focus on silicon because it is the most prevalent. All of the semiconductors will follow the general rules we will lay out here
A few more semiconductors: Germanium, Gallium Arsenide, Indium Nitride, Diamond, some polymers

A Little Chemistry
Recall that in chemistry, there are three common types of bonds:
Ionic: One atom captures an electron from another, creating ions. Metallic: Electrons are loosely held by the atoms, but no other atoms nearby have a stronger affinity. Covalent: Similar to ionic in that one atom takes an electron from another, but the electrons are not tightly bound to one atom. Instead they are shared between just two atoms.

We have the beginning of a dichotomy:

Semiconductors are useful because the do conduct electricity Yet what makes them more useful than metals is that they have some properties of insulators!

Covalent Bonds
e

Here is how to go from an insulator made of covalent bonds to a conductor:

We need to add enough energy to the bond to cause one of the electrons to break loose This electron can then travel through the crystal slowed only by scattering off the atoms (imagine trying o run through a dense forest). The positive charge left over by the electrons departure can also move! It acts just like an electron, but has a positive charge. We call it a hole, can you guess why?

Si

Si

h Si

e e Si

Semiconductor types
That last part might appear a bit unusual, since when are there positive versions of the electron? Well, it is true and we can even classify a semiconductor by the relative population of electrons to holes:
n-type: the electrons are the majority p-type: the holes are the majority intrinsic: their numbers are balanced

The other charge carrier in the semiconductor is known as the minority carrier.

Electrons and Holes

How can we create electrons and holes? There are several ways but devices make use of impurities: Here we try something different. We replace the occasional silicon atom with an atom of boron or phosphorus (typically). What does this do?
Boron has only three valence electrons. By putting it in place of a silicon atom, we automatically have a hole! We also call it an acceptor, because it is willing to accept an electron) Phosphorous has five valence electrons. This will give us an extra electron that isnt bonded. This is called a donor because it will donate an electron

This process is called doping, and is the way we turn a semiconductor into a p- or ntype, thus making it useful. You can also use heat or light to do this too.

A day in the life...

Recombination: Electrons and holes annihilate each other when they meet. Their energy gets dumped as photons or heat. Diffusion: Just like a drop of dye in water, they will spread out to try to fill all regions equally. Drift: If we apply an electric field they will move Both of these contribute to current in a semiconductor

Useful?
With two different kinds of semiconductor, we can make the most fundamental device which is the building block for almost everything else. It is called the p-n junction. We know it as the diode! Well be covering how it operates in detail and how that operation produces the characteristics weve already studied.

The p-n junction

We finally have all the concepts needed to look at the operation of a p-n junction We will start with the junction under open circuit conditions: this means that no carriers can leave or enter the device Lets think about what would happen if we had two slabs of semiconductor material, one n-type, the other p-type.
We place them in contact to produce a junction. On one side the there will be a majority of electrons and thus a minority of holes On the other side there will be a majority of holes and minority of electrons.

We would expect to see a diffusion current flow because there will be a sharp gradient in the carrier concentrations. Majority carriers flow into the opposite side, increasing the concentration of the minority carrier near the junction.

p-n junction II
Will this just continue until all the carriers are evenly distributed over the device? No! If it did, wed have a pretty useless devices as will be seen later. Well why not?
As the carriers bleed over, first they will be annihilated by recombination Second, as they move to the other side, they will leave behind the donor and acceptor atoms, which were charge neutral so long as their children electrons or holes were nearby, which is the case in a continuous slab of one type. Lacking the free carrier they added to the system, they have a net charge. This charge, opposite of the carrier and unable to move, will create an electric field that pulls on the carriers as they diffuse away. This process reaches an equilibrium state that gives us the common regions of a p-n junction

The p-n Junction III

This equilibrium configuration of the opencircuit p-n junction has three regions: p-type: Here, far away from the junction, the carrier concentrations look like they would in a solitary slab of p-type material n-type: This is the same as the p-type Depleted region: Found at the junction, the majority carriers a decreasing the closer one looks to the junction. In contrast the minority carriers are increasing. This is the first indication of where the oneway conductivity of the diode comes from: Charges injected from one side will see a barrier, while those injected from the other side will already be above the barrier.

Reverse Bias
We are going to consider what happens to the p-n junction when we inject a current I into it. Since we are interested in reverse bias, we want to know what the polarity of the p-n junction is. There are a few ways to think of this:
The built-in potential is blocking the flow of majority carriers. An external bias that would increase this potential will keep the junction unconductive A current that is injected so that majority carriers are depleted (i.e. inject minority carriers) will increase the depleted region, thus raising the built-in potential. You might see these are two sides of the same coin!

I must be less than the drift current IS, otherwise the junction will be in breakdown

Using the second description, we are going inject current such that minority charges are inserted into the majority region.

Reverse Bias II
These injected carriers will quickly annihilate the majority carriers they run into. The result will be less diffusion current into the depleted region, leading to an expansion of that region. With more charges exposed, the built-in potential will increase. The drift current will not change because it is independent of the built-in potential. This will leave us with a net current flowing across the device. In equilibrium, this net current will equal the injected current. Note that this makes sense:
The drift current is opposed to the flow of the majority carriers It is also bias independent, much like what we expect to see in a reverse biased diode; the current changes little with applied bias.

Breakdown Region
So far we only considered injected current that are less than the saturation current. We saw that what ends up happening is the diffusion current diminishes such that the net current through the device is equal to the injected current.
But this equation only holds if the net current is a maximum of IS. What happens if we inject more current than this?

We get breakdown! There are two mechanisms for breakdown:

Zener: Happens for biases <5V Avalanche: Happens for bias >7V Both occur in between 5 and 7V This generates carriers in the depleted region (where the field is). These carriers contribute to the drift current because they are moving in an electric field

Zener breakdown occurs when the electric field is strong enough to break bonds.

Avalanche follows a similar mechanism except that the carriers themselves acquire enough energy in the electric field tat they too can beak bonds
Those new carriers accelerate and can themselves break bonds This process repeats, amplifying the amount of carriers by factors of a million or more!

So, how can <5V be enough to break a bond? First off, this is not uncommon in electrochemistry. Second, consider that the fields are VERY strong. Think of <5V across 1m, that can be greater than 1 million volts per meter! (Dont forget the field is confined to the depleted region)

Forward Bias
Here again we look at a junction with injected current. Except we are now injecting majority carriers into the device. Here the equilibrium current is I=ID-IS The effect of this is to increase the concentration and thus increase the diffusion current across the depleted region. Now these carriers make it across the depleted region (unlike in open-circuit or reverse bias). Unlike the reverse bias case where the maximum current was limited by the drift current, the forward bias case has no upper limit on the current that can pass through Remember that the drift current is temperature dependent, but not dependent on the barrier height or width.

Types of diodes
Schottky-Barrier Diode
When you create a metal semiconductor junction, you can sometimes create an effective p-n junction complete with depleted region. This is a very cheap way to make a diode The voltage dependent reverse bias capacitance of a diode can be used as a tunable capacitor providing the diode is operated with a small input signal Special diodes with grading coefficients as high as or 4 are made for these applications. We already saw that light can create electron-hole pairs. If these pairs are formed inside the depleted region, the electric field will separate them and produce a current. This is the basis of a solar cell, among other applications Run in reverse bias, the current through the diode is proportional to the light falling on it, making it a very nice detector. Some diodes, when electrons and holes recombine in forward bias will emit light. This light comes from the energy released by the electron and hole as they recombine to reform a bond. Only special semiconductors are efficient at this process. Silicon unfortunately is not one of them! LEDs have much higher efficiency than an incandescent or fluorescent lamp.

Varactor

Photodiode

Light Emitting Diode