The Origin and Development of Semiconductor Diodes

origin

In 1874, Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered that certain metal sulfides (semiconductors) exhibit certain unidirectional conduction characteristics when in contact with metals, and made the first solid-state semiconductor detector. Now we know that this type of detector is actually a Schottky diode.

In 1940, scientists at Bell Laboratories prepared better performance Schottky diodes and PN junction diodes by regulating the types and concentrations of doping impurities in semiconductors and selecting metal materials with appropriate Fermi levels. The voltage on both sides of the diode can change the height and width of the diode barrier, making the flow of charge in the diode more difficult or easier, thereby achieving the unidirectional conduction characteristics of the diode, and thus the birth of a semiconductor diode.

Gradual development

However, the functionality of semiconductor diodes is limited, and researchers are attempting to upgrade them. In 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories added an electrode to a semiconductor diode, forming a collector, base, and emitter triode structure. They used the base to regulate the current between the emitter and collector, and subsequently produced the first semiconductor transistor, which was smaller in size compared to a vacuum electron tube More stable working performance, longer lifespan, and lower cost. This invention also won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.

After the 1980s, with the development of semiconductor device manufacturing technology, the development of Schottky barrier diodes gradually matured.

In 2007, Hu Jiangping, a researcher of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dai Xi, a professor of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, theoretically proposed to use the Josephson junction constructed of electron and hole doped superconductors to realize the superconducting diode effect, also known as Josephson diode. In 2020, the Teruo Ono research group at Kyoto University in Japan achieved the phenomenon of superconducting diodes in Nb/V/Ta superlattice superconductors by applying an external magnetic field; In 2022, the Mazhar Ali research group at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands achieved an external field free Josephson diode effect in the NbSe2/Nb3Br8/NbSe2 Josephson junction.

In 2022, the scientific researchers of the Institute of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a kind of light controlled diode. Through the design and construction of heterojunction, the device obtained a new type of photoelectric rectification characteristics, and the current state under light conditions realized the conversion from the fully closed state to the rectifier state, thus building the first photoelectric storage array without gating devices.