Semiconductors
Semiconducting minerals and prepared materials with electrically tunable conduction between conductors and insulators, including early rectifying behavior.
Core metadata
- ID: semiconductors
- Era: Industrial
- First known date: 1874 (exact)
- Region: Germany and global electronics industry
- Review status: source_checked
- Maturity: established
Prerequisites
- Advanced Chemistry (advanced_chemistry)
- Electricity (electricity)
- Mining (mining)
- Scientific Method (scientific_method)
Dependents
Fields
Field lanes
- Semiconductors & Integrated Circuits: Materials & Devices
Node sources
- 1874: Semiconductor Point-Contact Rectifier Effect is Discovered (Computer History Museum, 2007, museum) • Supports: node, maturity
Prerequisite edge evidence
Edge/source evidence summary:
- Prerequisite edges: 4
- Average edge confidence: 69%
- Prerequisite sources: 4
- expert_inference: 3
- textbook: 1
| Prerequisite | Type | Confidence | Evidence level | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electricity (electricity) | enabling | 78% | textbook | Electrical phenomena are essential for describing semiconductor behavior, but other characterizations can occur without being the sole path to the material category. |
|
| Advanced Chemistry (advanced_chemistry) | enabling | 70% | expert_inference | Chemical understanding of crystalline materials helps identify and prepare semiconducting substances without making later chip processing a prerequisite. |
|
| Scientific Method (scientific_method) | enabling | 68% | expert_inference | Controlled physical experiment and measurement enabled the 1874 semiconductor rectifier observation. |
|
| Mining (mining) | common_dependency | 58% | expert_inference | Mineral semiconductors such as galena require extracted crystal materials, but mining is contextual supply rather than device physics. |
|
This page is generated from canonical era JSON and is indexable by URL.