ECN 101

Introduction to Electronics and Communication Engineering

• Project groups to be formed by 15th August.
• 6 students in each group.

• Hardware based course project.

Review
Electronics is about electrons.

Fundamental property associated with electrons are electricity and magnetism.

Fundamental property associated with electrons are electricity and magnetism.

Fundamental property associated with electrons are electricity and magnetism.

On the foundations of electricity and magnetism – electronics rests.

Notable names: Franklin, Volta, Edison, Faraday, Oersted, Tesla, Maxwell

Formally, electronic engineering started with vacuum tube devices.

Rapid growth happened after the advent of solid state electronics.

Introduction to semiconductor devices
• Electron – fundamental particle with unit negative charge.
• Roughly the radius of an electron is 1 fm while that of an atom is 1 Angstrom.

• What is as semiconductor: conductivity between metal and insulators

• Conductivity of metals: 107 (Ω-m) -1 [Metals conduct both heat and electric current]
• Conductivity of insulators: 10-10 (Ω-m)-1
• Conductivity of semiconductors: 10-6 to 104(Ω-m)-1

• Why semiconductors to make devices

• We need controlled flow of electrons
• Conductors allow continuous flow of electrons
• Insulators disallow electron flow.
• Semiconductors’ flow of electron can be tuned and controlled.
Semiconductor industry
• The revenue of semiconductor industry is approximately 412.2 billion dollar, worldwide.

• Almost 13 x 1021 MOSFET have been fabricated between 1960 – 2018.

• A semiconductor fabrication plant – also called foundry

• Extremely high investment intensive

• Around 3-5 billion dollar investment
• Clean room
• Extremely costly instruments
Semiconductors
Si, Ge, GaAs Photoelectric effect
Quantum mechanics

Atomic energy levels (hydrogen atom)

Bulk - covalently bonded

Covalent bonding in Si crystal Covalent bonding in GaAs crystal

What happens when lots of such atoms come close to each other.
Band structure of metals, semiconductors and insulators
Charge carriers in semiconductors, doping
• Doping of semiconductors
• The notion of holes
• Intrinsic and extrinsic semiconductors
• Difference in the number of holes
• The n- and p-type materials are the basic building blocks of
semiconductor devices.

n-type material p-type material

• Current flow in metals is due to the flow of electrons.

• Current flow in semiconductors is due to both electrons and holes

• Majority and minority carriers.

Carrier transport in solids
• Mechanism

• Electrons and holes

• Conductivity

• Direct and Indirect semiconductors

• Hall Effect

• Carrier generation-recombination [temperature, light]

Semiconductor junctions: diode
• Once we have both n-type and p-type materials available with us, what happens when we put
two different kind of materials together

Majority and minority currents.

PN junction: diode
No bias Reverse bias Forward bias

The current that exists under reverse-bias conditions

is called the reverse saturation current: nA - μA n – ideality factor of diode
Diode IV characteristics and breakdown
• As the voltage across the diode increases in the reverse-bias
region, the velocity of the minority carriers responsible for the
reverse saturation current Is will also increase.

• Eventually, their velocity and associated kinetic energy will be

sufficient to release additional carriers through collisions with
otherwise stable atomic structures.

Diode: different semiconductors