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When People Hear The Word Doping, They Think Of Athletes

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When people hear the word doping, they think of athletes using drugs such as, erythropoietin, so that they will have an advantage in their sport. However, the doping we are talking about today is the type where elements are added to semiconductors to change its characteristics. Doping is the process that changes the electrical conductivity of a semiconductor, like silicon. Doping is done by adding foreign elements to the semiconductor so that the amount of valence electrons changes.

A semiconductor is a material that partly conducts electricity, it is in between an insulator and a conductor. Semiconductors have four electrons in their valence shell, and since there needs to be eight in the shell for it to be stable, it just has to connect …show more content…

Through doping, it creates two groups of semiconductors, N-type, which have a negative charge and P-type, which have a positive charge. These different types of semiconductors are very important to the world, because when the different types are used together they can create devices with special electrical devices that have the ability to control electrical signals. Before semiconductors there were vacuum tubes, which did the same job as semiconductors, but they were not as fast or as small as them. Vacuum tubes, however, are very rugged and durable they can go through temporary overload conditions.

Doped semiconductors are very useful, as they make up the base for diodes. A diode is an electronic component that is used to make signal limiters, voltage regulators, switches, etc. Doped semiconductors also make transistors, they are devices that regulate the current flow and they act as a switch or gate for electronic signals. Transistors have three layers of semiconductors and when one layer senses a small change of current it creates a rapid change in the current through the whole component. As one can see, doped semiconductors are very important as they make the base of many electronic devices that we use daily The effects of doping semiconductors were known for a long time in devices like crystal radio detectors and selenium rectifiers. In 1885 and 1930, Shellford Bidwell and Bernhard Gudden

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