Introduction: Silicon in All Its Forms
I am truly and deeply honored to be selected to give this talk. One of the highlights of my early career was to take a trek up to Harvard and visit with Professor David Turnbull. Although I only spent a small amount of time with him, it made a considerabl
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1.1 Introduction I am truly and deeply honored to be selected to give this talk. One of the highlights of my early career was to take a trek up to Harvard and visit with Professor David Turnbull. Although I only spent a small amount of time with him, it made a considerable impact on me. With respect to the matter at hand, I am going to tell you about my favorite material: element 14, silicon. As you know, we live in the age of silicon; it is all around us in terms of electronic devices. Silicon is the quintessential electronic material. It is often said that understanding silicon and its role in electronic materials is similar to understanding iron and its role in metallurgy and making steel. It has not always been that way, though. On May 10, 1954, a press release was issued on the first silicon transistor. Texas Instruments announced a "revolutionary new electronic product - long-predicted and awaited: the silicon transistor." By using silicon instead of germanium, the initial commercial silicon transistor immediately raised power outputs and doubled the operating temperature, [1]. In 1954, we had a transistor made of silicon for the first time. In 1965, we had a chip containing rv 2000 transistors. In 2001, the Pentium 4 processor made by Intel consisted of 42 million transistors. Intel believes that by the year 2007, it will have created a processor containing one billion transistors, [2]. This is an amazing progression of technology, and we could spend days talking about the technical developments of silicon and devices made with silicon. However, I am going to discuss a different aspect of silicon technology, namely, the role that silicon has played in the development of theoretical tools for understanding materials. In the 1970s, approximately 30,000 papers were published with the word "silicon" in the abstract. In the 1980s, the number was up to 84,000 papers. By the time we got into the 1990s, the corresponding number was 135,652 (an average of one paper every 90 minutes), [3]. This amounts to a database of roughly a quarter of a million papers over the last 30 years directly or indirectly written about silicon. Most of these papers are focused on technological * Reproduced by permission of MRS Bulletin. J. Chelikowsky, "Silicon in All Its Forms", MRS Bulletin, Vol. 27 No. 12 (2002), pp. 951-960.
P. Siffert et al. (eds.), Silicon © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004
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and experimental aspects of silicon, but this body of work has profoundly influenced the theoretical community. Specifically, theorists have capitalized on this vast database. Any new theory related to electronic materials is almost always first tested and assessed against the silicon database. I am going to cover about 40 years' worth of history in an overview of the role that silicon has played in our understanding of electronic materials. Needless to say, I will be brief in my discussion and it will be highly abridged. I will outline some major achievements over the last few decades in our fundamental understanding
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