Exploiting Piezoelectricity

What happened

Electronics Weekly revisits a historical story it ran 65 years ago in its 'Tomorrow's Thinking' column of its May 3, 196 edition: at that time, piezoelectricity, a property of many semiconductors, had not yet been exploited. The story explained that many crystal structures, including gallium arsenide and cadmium sulphide, were of a type in which the effect might be expected; to date materials had been too conductive for the effect to be used, but by forming a depletion layer the property could be used — the depletion layer is swept free of mobile charge carriers, allowing the high electric field strengths required to observe piezoelectric effects to be maintained. Because depletion-layer thickness depends on voltage, the resonant frequency of the slice can be varied, with resonant frequencies from 300 Mc/s to well over 1,000 Mc/s obtainable. The work was verified using a quartz transducer to couple a signal into a 530 Mc/s resonant cavity via a piezoelectric semiconductor; the delayed pulse magnitude was very sensitive to voltage, proving it due to the depletion layer and not to effects in the bulk semiconductor or quartz. Further work was being carried out at Bell Telephone Laboratories by Donald L. White, directed toward increasing operating frequency and bandwidth and improving efficiency. This is historical background content with no current price or supply-demand event.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: Electronics Weekly · 10/26/2026 · View original source