In this blog post, we will take a look at how semiconductors and information and communication technology (ICT) have led the world’s transformation and become the core of a new economic revolution.
The world has undergone tremendous changes over the past few decades, and the rapid development of ICT has been at the center of these changes. Information that was scattered all over the analog world has been converted into binary numbers of 0s and 1s and stored in a single transistor, a single chip, and a single machine.
Thanks to technological advances, machines can communicate with each other freely, and we have entered an era where most convenience issues can be easily solved. Now, in this online and digital world, software-based service industries are booming with immense popularity and demand. What was the beginning of this fundamental revolution in the changing behavior patterns and industrial structure of people? It was the development of semiconductors and the beginning of the semiconductor industry.
So, what exactly do semiconductors do, and how do they store and manage information? Semiconductors are materials that are literally half conductors and half insulators (materials that do not conduct electricity). The important word “half” here means that semiconductors can become either conductors or 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 make it easier to understand through an analogy, the theory of classical electromagnetism was already perfectly established by a physicist named James Clerk Maxwell even before the development of semiconductors. Humans had no problem making containers (capacitors and coils) that hold electromagnetic energy, but they had no technology to create and operate valves that connect the containers and control the movement of energy between them. Semiconductors are, simply put, containers with valves or faucets.
There are many types of semiconductors, and each semiconductor regulates the opening and closing of valves through changes in voltage, light intensity, and temperature. In addition to the type of stimulus to which it responds, there are differences depending on how many terminals the current flows through. Here are two of the simplest semiconductor devices. A diode has one valve and two terminals, and it can direct the current flowing from one side to the other side or prevent it from flowing depending on the change in voltage. A transistor has three terminals, and it directs the current flowing in one side to the other two terminals in a specific ratio depending on the change in voltage.
So far, we have briefly explained the function of semiconductors. To recap, semiconductors are devices that store, transfer, and manipulate electromagnetic energy. Then, what was the driving force behind the explosive growth of the semiconductor industry and the electronics industry after the development of semiconductor devices, which led to the current IT revolution? It is sand, an inexpensive material that is often referred to in the industry as “God’s gift,” and boasts the second-largest amount of it on the surface of the earth. Sand is silicon oxide, and silicon is a group 4 element on the periodic table that offers the best semiconductor function between conductors and insulators.
Thanks to these cheap and abundant materials, research on semiconductor devices was conducted at Nokia Bell Labs. After the development of the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) here, the development of field effect transistors (FET) and other devices was actively carried out, mainly in the United States. In particular, the integrated circuit developed by Jack Kilby and Robert Norton Noyce was a major turning point and a stepping stone for the electronics industry.
The development of integrated circuits was so influential that it was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, even though it is not a pure physics field. An example that can easily explain the power of integrated circuits is the radio that I made with solder when I was a student. This radio only needed to be plugged into the board properly and then soldered to each board. The reason for this was that the board was already designed with a path for current to flow. Once the design is made, mass production becomes very cheap by repeatedly printing the design on the board.
What is even more amazing is that tens of thousands of transistors are now connected to an integrated circuit within a single chip to function properly at once. This is despite the fact that the production method is surprisingly easy and inexpensive.
In Korea, many semiconductor and electronics companies, including Samsung, LG, and Hynix, have achieved amazing products, sales, and technological advances over the past few decades. Companies like Intel, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm, as well as many electronics companies in Silicon Valley, have changed the world. Semiconductors, which have created a new era and economic revolution by controlling the flow of invisible electrons, are perhaps the most powerful and smallest force that has changed the world.
