Designing A Hobbyist’s Semiconductor Dopant

[ProjectsInFlight] has been on a mission to make his own semiconductors for about a year now, and recently shared a major step toward that goal: homemade spin-on dopants. Doping semiconductors …read more

May 19, 2025 - 04:00

Designing A Hobbyist’s Semiconductor Dopant

Two clear phials are shown in the foreground, next to a glass flask. One phial is labelled “P,” and the other is labelled “N”.

[ProjectsInFlight] has been on a mission to make his own semiconductors for about a year now, and recently shared a major step toward that goal: homemade spin-on dopants. Doping semiconductors has traditionally been extremely expensive, requiring either ion-implantation equipment or specialized chemicals for thermal diffusion. [ProjectsInFlight] wanted to use thermal diffusion doping, but first had to formulate a cheaper dopant.

Thermal diffusion doping involves placing a source of dopant atoms (phosphorus or boron in this case) on top of the chip to be doped, heating the chip, and letting the dopant atoms diffuse into the silicon. [ProjectsInFlight] used spin-on glass doping, in which an even layer of precursor chemicals is spin-coated onto the chip. Upon heating, the precursors decompose to leave behind a protective film of glass containing the dopant atoms, which diffuse out of the glass and into the silicon.

After trying a few methods to create a glass layer, [ProjectsInFlight] settled on a composition based on tetraethyl orthosilicate, which we’ve seen used before to create synthetic opals. After finding this method, all he had to do was find the optimal reaction time, heating, pH, and reactant proportions. Several months of experimentation later, he had a working solution.

After some testing, he found that he could bring silicon wafers from their original light doping to heavy doping. This is particularly impressive when you consider that his dopant is about two orders of magnitude cheaper than similar commercial products.

Of course, after doping, you still need to remove the glass layer with an oxide etchant, which we’ve covered before. If you prefer working with lasers, we’ve also seen those used for doping.