As a material with a wide range of applications and a wide variety of types, silicone has penetrated into every aspect of our lives, from construction machinery to cosmetics and daily necessities. Silicone is everywhere around us. Let's take a look at the application of silicone in the electronic field.


Single crystal silicon
Single crystal silicon is a relatively active non-metallic element and an important component of crystal materials. It is at the forefront of the development of new materials.
Single crystal silicon is mainly used to make semiconductor components and is the raw material for making semiconductor silicon devices. It is used to make high-power rectifiers, high-power transistors, diodes, switching devices, etc. Its subsequent products, integrated circuits and semiconductor separation devices, have been widely used in various fields and also occupy an important position in military electronic equipment.


Polycrystalline silicon
Polycrystalline silicon is a form of single silicon. When molten single silicon solidifies under supercooling conditions, silicon atoms are arranged into many crystal nuclei in the form of diamond lattices. If these crystal nuclei grow into grains with different crystal plane orientations, these grains will combine and crystallize into polycrystalline silicon.
Polycrystalline silicon is the direct raw material for producing single crystal silicon. It is the basic electronic information material for semiconductor devices such as contemporary artificial intelligence, automatic control, information processing, and photoelectric conversion. It is called the "cornerstone of the microelectronics building."


Silicon wafer (including slices, grinding wafers, and polishing wafers)
Silicon is a semiconductor material, and its own conductivity is not very good. However, its resistivity can be precisely controlled by adding appropriate dopants. Before manufacturing semiconductors, silicon must be converted into wafers. This starts with the growth of silicon ingots. Single crystal silicon is a solid formed by atoms in a three-dimensional spatial pattern periodically, and this pattern runs through the entire material. Polycrystalline silicon is formed by many small single crystals with different crystal orientations separately and cannot be used to make semiconductor circuits. Polycrystalline silicon must be melted into single crystals before it can be processed into wafers used in semiconductor applications. It takes from one week to one month to process a silicon wafer to produce a silicon ingot, depending on many factors, including size, quality, and end-user requirements. More than 75% of single crystal silicon wafers are grown by the Czochralski (CZ, also known as the pulling method) method.


Semiconductors or chips are produced from silicon. Millions of transistors are etched on the wafer, which are hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. Semiconductors manage data by controlling the current to form various words, numbers, sounds, images and colors. They are widely used in integrated circuits and indirectly used by everyone on the earth. Some of these applications are daily applications, such as computers, telecommunications and televisions, while others are used in advanced microwave transmission, laser conversion systems, medical diagnostic and treatment equipment, defense systems and NASA space shuttles.


Epitaxial wafer
Epitaxial is a type of semiconductor process. In the bipolar process, the bottom layer of the silicon wafer is P-type substrate silicon (some add a buried layer); then a layer of single crystal silicon is grown on the substrate, which is called the epitaxial layer; later, the base region, emitter region, etc. are implanted on the epitaxial layer. Finally, a vertical NPN tube structure is basically formed: the epitaxial layer is the collector region, and the epitaxial layer has the base region and emitter region. Epitaxial wafers are silicon wafers with epitaxial layers made on the substrate.


Semiconductor manufacturers mainly use polished Si wafers (PW) and epitaxial Si wafers as raw materials for ICs. Epitaxial products are used in four areas. CMOS complementary metal oxide semiconductors support cutting-edge processes that require small device sizes. CMOS products are the largest application area for epitaxial wafers and are used by IC manufacturers for non-recoverable device processes, including microprocessors and logic chips, as well as flash memory and DRAM (dynamic random access memory) for memory applications. Discrete semiconductors are used to manufacture components that require precise Si characteristics. The "exotic" semiconductor category includes some special products that use non-Si materials, many of which use compound semiconductor materials incorporated into the epitaxial layer. Buried layer semiconductors are physically isolated using heavily doped regions in bipolar transistor components, which are also deposited during epitaxial processing.


Amorphous silicon film
Amorphous silicon (α-Si) is also called amorphous silicon. A form of single-element silicon. Brown-black or gray-black microcrystals. Silicon does not have a complete diamond unit cell and is not very pure. The melting point, density and hardness are also significantly lower than crystalline silicon.
The chemical properties of amorphous silicon are more active than crystalline silicon. α-silicon is characterized by short-range order and long-range disorder. Pure α-silicon cannot be used due to its high defect density. Amorphous silicon film containing hydrogen is obtained by glow discharge vapor deposition, in which hydrogen compensates for hanging chains, and is doped and pn junctions are made. It is mainly used to refine pure silicon and manufacture solar cells, thin film transistors, copy drums, photoelectric sensors, etc.