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Compound Semiconductors

Compound semiconductors are semiconductors composed of two or more elements. These are sometimes called III-V materials due to the fact that they are commonly compounds of two or more elements from groups III-V of the periodic table. Silicon is made from a single element, and therefore is not a compound semiconductor.

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Compound Semiconductor

Compound semiconductors offer many advantages over silicon for certain applications. For example, electrons in compound semiconductors move much faster than electrons in silicon, enabling high-speed processing that’s over 100 times faster than silicon. Furthermore, compound semiconductors operate at lower voltage, can emit and sense light, generate microwaves and are magnetically sensitive and resistant to heat. They can store, route, transmit and detect data at a fraction of the energy used by current solutions. They therefore have a wide range of use cases that improve performance for current applications that use silicon-based semiconductors and will open up a vast spectrum of applications that silicon-based semiconductors can’t support. Compound semiconductors are already used in power amplifiers for smartphones and other wireless devices, light sources for DVDs and Blu-rays, LEDs, solar batteries, and solar cells and gyro stabilizers in satellites, to name a few. Common elements used for compound semiconductors include:

·       Gallium Arsenide (GaAs)
·       Gallium Nitride (GaN)
·       Indium Phosphide (InP)
·       Zinc Sulphide (ZnS)
·       Zinc Selenide (ZnSe)
·       Silicon Carbide (SiC)
·       Silicon Germanium (SiGe)