What is gallium arsenide used for?

What exactly is gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material?

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor materials have high electron mobility (about 5.7 times that of silicon) and wide band gap structure compared with traditional silicon materials.It can conduct current much faster under the same conditions.We can use gallium arsenide semiconductor materials to prepare microwave devices, which play a key role in satellite data transmission, mobile communication, GPS global navigation and other fields.

An important characteristic of gallium arsenide semiconductor materials is its photoelectric properties.Due to its structure such as direct band gap (by absorbing or emitting photon energy, electrons directly transition from valence band to conduction band, thus having higher luminous efficiency) and wide band gap, its light emission efficiency is higher than that of silicon and germanium semiconductor materials.It can not only be used to produce light-emitting diodes, light detectors, but also can be used to prepare semiconductor lasers, widely used in optical communication and other fields.In addition, gallium arsenide semiconductor materials also have high temperature resistance, low power and other characteristics, which are widely used in the field of satellite communication.

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphor (InP) are the basic materials of microelectronics and optoelectronics. Gallium arsenide is the most important and widely used compound semiconductor material, and also the most mature compound semiconductor material with the largest production.Gallium arsenide has high electron mobility (5-6 times that of silicon), large band gap (1.43eV for gallium arsenide and 1.1eV for Si) and direct band gap, so it is easy to make semi-insulating material, low intrinsic carrier concentration and good photoelectric characteristics.Gallium arsenide devices have good frequency response, high speed and high operating temperature, which can meet the needs of integrated optoelectronics.It is the most important photoelectronic material at present, and also the most important microelectronic material after silicon material. It is suitable for manufacturing high-frequency, high-speed devices and circuits.

In addition, GaAs material also has heat resistance, radiation resistance and magnetic field sensitive characteristics.Therefore, the devices made of this material also have special uses and diversity, and its application has been extended to the fields that silicon and germanium devices cannot reach.Even in 1998 when the world semiconductor industry was in recession, the sales market of GaAs material devices was still promising [1].Of course, GaAs material also has some disadvantages, such as high melting point vapor pressure, difficult to control the composition, slow growth rate of single crystal, weak mechanical strength, poor integrity and high price, which greatly affect its application degree.However, the unique properties of GaAs materials and their wide use in military, civil and industrial fields have attracted great attention from various countries, and a lot of money has been invested in development and research.