The elements

The Periodic Table

Everyone is probably aware of the periodic table but most people do not think about it, or refer to it, on a regular basis. Even in my own research I really only focus on a select few elements from the table and rarely think about it as a whole and how widely each individual component is used. I came across a simple, but still informative, periodic table with some more common uses for most all of the elements. While it is overly simplistic, and does not indicate how much of any of these elements go into the macro scale objects they reference, it is still fun to look through many of them and learn something new. Click the image below to go to the interactive site.

My Own Research

The semiconductor industry is contained in a majority of the lime/yellow portion of the table above. Silicon (Si) is the most abundant semiconductor used. It is in most solar panels you see and comprises most all of the electronics in your computer, smartphone, etc. Silicon is a semiconductor by itself, but there are far many more semiconductors that are a combination of two or more elements, termed “compound semiconductors”.¹ The compound semiconductor my research focuses on is gallium arsenide (GaAs²).

Gallium Arsenide (GaAs)

GaAs is useful in both the electronic and solar side of the semiconductor industry. You probably don’t hear about it as much because in general it is more expensive to produce, and more brittle, compared to silicon. It is part of a class often referred to as III-V (“three-five”) semiconductors since gallium is in the old group III and arsenic is in the old group V column of the periodic table.³ My research is focused on developing a new process to grow films of GaAs in a more cost effective way than what is currently available in an effort to make the more efficient solar cells they produce available to a larger market.

I’ll leave it at that for now but plenty more detail will come in the future. I’ll cover what a semiconductor is, along with some basic principles, and why GaAs is beneficial in a number of ways to the semiconductor industry in the future but simply want to provide an introduction to my research area at this point.