Over the past few decades, the development of semiconductors, along with the rapid advancement of information and communication technology, has transformed the world. Semiconductors are key devices for storing and manipulating electromagnetic energy, ushering in the digital age and revolutionizing industries and economic structures.
The world has undergone tremendous change in the past few decades, and at the center of it all has been the rapid development of information and communication technologies. Information that was scattered here and there in the analog world was converted to binary 0s and 1s and stored in a single transistor, a single chip, and a single machine.
Advances in technology allowed machines to communicate freely with each other, and we entered an era where most of our conveniences were easily solved. Now, in this online and digital world, software-based services are booming with immense popularity and huge demand. What is the beginning of this fundamental revolution in human behavior and industrial structure? The development of semiconductors and the beginning of the semiconductor industry.
But what exactly do semiconductors do, and how do they store and manage information? A semiconductor is literally a material that is half conductor and half insulator (a material that does not allow current to flow). The important word “half” means that semiconductors can be both conductors and insulators depending on the situation. We can control the electrical properties of semiconductors by changing external conditions such as light, heat, voltage, and current.
To use an analogy, even before the development of semiconductors, the theory of classical electromagnetism had already been fully formulated by a physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Humans had no problem creating vessels to contain electromagnetic energy (capacitors and coils), but they didn’t have the technology to create and operate valves to connect the vessels and regulate the flow of energy between them. A semiconductor is simply a bowl with a valve or faucet.
There are many different types of semiconductors, each of which regulates the opening and closing of the valve through changes in voltage, light intensity, or temperature. In addition to the type of stimulus they respond to, they also differ in how many terminals they have through which current flows. Let’s take a look at two of the simplest semiconductor devices. A diode has one valve and two terminals, and depending on the change in voltage, it can allow current to flow from one side to the other or not at all. A transistor has three terminals, and its job is to divide the current flowing through one of them in a specific ratio to the other two, depending on the change in voltage.
So far, we’ve outlined the functions of semiconductors. To recap, a semiconductor is a device that stores, moves, and manipulates electromagnetic energy. But what is the driving force behind the explosive growth of the electronics industry and the IT revolution that followed the development of semiconductor devices? It’s an inexpensive material that is often referred to as a “godsend” in the industry and is the second most abundant material on Earth’s surface: sand. Sand is oxidized silicon, which is a quaternary element in the periodic table of elements that provides the best semiconductor functionality between conductors and non-conductors.
This cheap and abundant material led to research into semiconductor devices at Nokia Bell Labs. After the development of the bipolar junction transistor, the development of field effect transistors and other semiconductor devices was centered in the United States. In particular, the Integrated Circuit, developed by Jack Kilby and Robert Norton Noyce, was a major turning point and springboard for the electronics industry.
The development of the integrated circuit was so influential that it was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, even though it is not a purely physical field. An easy way to illustrate the power of integrated circuits is to think about the radio you built by soldering when you were in school. All you had to do was plug the elements into the board and solder them together, because the board had already been designed with pathways for current to flow. By designing once and then repeatedly stamping that design onto the board, mass production became very inexpensive.
What’s even more amazing is that we now have tens of thousands of transistors on a single chip, all connected together in an integrated circuit, all working properly at once. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to produce.
In Korea, many semiconductor electronics companies, including Samsung, LG, and Hynix, have made incredible product, sales, and technological advances over the past few decades. Globally, companies like Intel, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and many other electronics companies in Silicon Valley have changed the world. By regulating the invisible flow of electrons, semiconductors have created a new era and sparked an economic revolution, but are they the most powerful and smallest force that has changed the world?
