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Patent Granted Gallium nitride (GaN) is a binary III/V direct bandgap semiconductor commonly used in bright light-emitting diodes since the 1990s. The compound is a very hard material that has a Wurtzite crystal structure. Its wide band gap of 3.4 eV affords it special properties for applications in optoelectronic,[4][5] high-power and high-frequency devices. For example, GaN is the substrate which makes violet (405 nm) laser diodes possible, without use of nonlinear optical frequency-doubling. A semiconductor is a material which has electrical conductivity between that of a conductor such as copper and that of an insulator such as glass. Semiconductors are the foundation of modern electronics, including transistors, solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), quantum dots and digital and analog integrated circuits. The modern understanding of the properties of a semiconductor relies on quantum physics to explain the movement of electrons inside a lattice of atoms.