Why is silicon 'the choice' for ICs?' need explanation

[ZincBear]

Why Silicon?

Dear all,

Why is silicon 'the choice' for ICs? I am aware that materials such as GaAs and GaN are used in MMICs where high frequencies are involved. So why is silicon still the major material used in all ICs?...

 

[AdvaRes]

Re: Why Silicon?

Dear all,

Why is silicon 'the choice' for ICs? I am aware that materials such as GaAs and GaN are used in MMICs where high frequencies are involved. So why is silicon still the major material used in all ICs?...

Simply because the silicon is abondant and low cost compared to GaAs....

 

[subharpe]

Re: Why Silicon?

To add to these most important reasons, Si provides very high substrate resistivity, it is one of the elementary semiconductor material and crystalline Si is easy to achieve from it's natural resources.

 

[drabos]

Why Silicon?

Si-Sio2 interface is quite good, almost perfect --> good for MOS devices

 

[xulfee]

Why Silicon?

due to low cost we use silicon,but for effiecent circuits we use some other materials

 

[wpchan05]

Re: Why Silicon?

Dear all,

Why is silicon 'the choice' for ICs? I am aware that materials such as GaAs and GaN are used in MMICs where high frequencies are involved. So why is silicon still the major material used in all ICs?...

Si has higher quality switches which allows digital circuits to be integrated with analog/rf blocks under the same substrate.

 

[ZincBear]

Re: Why Silicon?

Thank you all for the inputs!

Silicon is so cheap and abundant as a raw material, but requires many processes, probably more than fabricating a GaAs IC. How approximately how much is it to fabricate a silicon chip?

 

[jgrant3]

Re: Why Silicon?

Thank you all for the inputs!

Silicon is so cheap and abundant as a raw material, but requires many processes, probably more than fabricating a GaAs IC. How approximately how much is it to fabricate a silicon chip?

It depends on how many metal layers there are. Simply put more metal layers means several more processing procedures implying much more cost.

As an example a typical 4 metal layer Si CMOS process will cost around 15000 euros for 30-40 chips of ~ 6 mm by 6 mm.

 

[electronics_kumar]

Re: Why Silicon?

readily available as a raw material and even though is forward voltage is .7 (for Ge its is .3)its leakage current is low when compared with Ge that why its widely used

 

[pravardhan]

Re: Why Silicon?

Silicon is mostly used in High Power Devices such as Power Mosfets, Power Transistors and IGBTs.

And, it has less leakage current.

 

[sreevyas]

Re: Why Silicon?

Hi All!
don't relate cost etc.,
Silicon has physical and electrically best quality native oxide compared to other semiconductor materilas.
does it make sense
__sree