I’m very interested to learn more about this stuff but my mind just couldn’t grasp it. There’s just so much information to take in. Where should I start?
In: Engineering
In a very very easy terms:
A semi-conductor is a wire that can conduct an electricity in one direction only. Imagine it like a gate, or a valve.
Now, it’s a very simple thing. But having few of them allows you to arrange them into an interesting layout, when you can make a controlled gate.
And from that you can arrange hundreds of those controlled gates into layouts to make simple memory cells or arithmetic machines.
And you can arrange hundreds and thousands of those small machines into CPUs and GPUs and microcontrollers.
[This](https://www.nandgame.com/) is a great game that goes over this process.
Semiconductors are materials that sometimes conduct electricity, and sometimes don’t, and you can control when they do and when they don’t. So you can make a tiny patch of semiconductor material and attach 3 wires. When you “turn on” the control wire, it can allow or block electricity to flow between the other two wires, like turning on and off a light switch.
Do you want to know how that effect happens at the electon level, or how you can chain a bunch of those single “transistors” to make logic circuits?
A semiconductor is a material which you can adjust how good it is at conducting electricity by the amount of specific impurities you add. Beyond just this, there are two basic types of how they conduct which is determined by which impurities you add. When you put pieces of the two different types of conducting semiconductors together, you can make all kinds of interesting devices and circuits. Furthermore, if you don’t have the impurities, some semiconductors can be completely insulating – they won’t conduct well at all.
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