Semiconductors allow electricity to pass through them in certain situations and block it in others. In most cases, the semiconductors are crystalline, and impurities of various kinds are put into the crystal to help route the electricity through them in the desired manner. In the 21st century, semiconductors are ubiquitous. You’ll find them both in places you expect and don’t expect including these four technology products.
1. Phones and Tablets
To be able to do so many things in so small a space, your phone has semiconductors inside it. Each of the impurities inside the crystals of the phone’s semiconductors forms part of a crystal lattice, which allows “charge carriers” to power the phone’s features. A “charge carrier” is a particle that carries an electric charge. Those particles are electrons and ions.
The small size allowed by semiconductors is why the chips that power these small devices are hundreds of times more powerful than big computers of the past. This is the biggest advantage of using semiconductors in the construction of such devices.
2. Speaking of Computers…
Even desktop and laptop computers have gotten smaller over the years even as they’ve become ever more powerful. One home desktop computer in 2025 can do more than the IBM mainframes of the 1990s. One modern game uses more memory than the computers that ran the stock exchange even as few as 20 years ago. The semiconductors in the computer’s CPU and internal memory make this possible.
3. Vehicles
Semiconductors in vehicles are found in the onboard computers. They run the car’s systems, including the driver-assistance features that include things like lane-keeping assist, lane-departure warning, and front-end collision warning systems. When it comes to advanced technology, such as Level-III autonomous driving, semiconductors are also what enable such systems to work. Fuel injection is now controlled by a computer. Mechanics use computers to diagnose car problems now. Semiconductors are what let us enjoy the massive entertainment and navigation systems in vehicles.
4. Robots
The robots that you see working in factories doing repetitive and/or menial jobs need semiconductors to power all of their myriad parts and to control the fine movements necessary for some of the work they do. Robots also have to interact with their operators and the rest of their environment, and semiconductors let them do that more easily than they could without them.
One of the most exciting semiconductor applications out there is the MOSFET, which stands for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. MOSFETs are among the most common transistors used in digital circuits, such as those in robots. Their chief advantage is that they require very little or no current to control. The MOSFET is the latest incarnation of a field-effect transistor, which was invented 100 years ago this year. Today, they’re made either from silicon or a mixture of silicon and germanium. In complex items like robots, there could be millions of these transistors included as part of the logic circuits that comprise the “brain” of the robot. They’re also central to the construction of data storage devices, making them largely indispensable for modern microelectronics.