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No. CMOS is not a type of silicon: it is a circuit and chip-fabrication technology built around complementary n-type and p-type MOS transistors. Silicon is a common semiconductor material used to make those transistors, but a CMOS chip also contains other materials, and the exact combination depends on its manufacturing process.
What does CMOS mean?
CMOS stands for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor. The name refers to a technology for making circuits with two complementary kinds of MOS transistor: nMOS and pMOS. Samsung describes CMOS as an integrated-circuit type that combines PMOS and NMOS transistors in a complementary circuit (Samsung Semiconductor’s CMOS glossary).
So “CMOS” describes how circuit elements are arranged and made; “silicon” names a material. A CMOS chip is an integrated circuit, not a piece of elemental silicon.
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What materials are in a CMOS chip?
Many CMOS devices are fabricated on silicon wafers, with transistor structures formed in or on the silicon. The device also needs materials that control current, insulate parts of the structure, connect components, and carry signals. The particular materials and their arrangement vary by manufacturer and process.
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Silicon and doped regions
Silicon is a semiconductor: its electrical behavior can be adjusted. Manufacturers introduce small amounts of dopant atoms into selected regions of the silicon to change those regions’ electrical properties. Dopants are incorporated into parts of the semiconductor; they are not a separate bulk layer. A 2016 National Institute of Standards and Technology publication discusses how dopant atoms in silicon affect electronic properties and how random dopant placement can contribute to device variability (NIST, “Atomically precise device fabrication”).
Insulators, gates, contacts, and wiring
Transistors need a gate structure to control current, insulating material to separate components, and conductive contacts and wiring to connect the circuit. One specific example illustrates how much more than silicon can be involved: the Semi-Conductor Laboratory of India describes a 180 nm CMOS process on an 8-inch p-type silicon wafer. Its listed materials include nitrided gate oxide, doped polysilicon gates, cobalt silicide, tungsten contacts and vias, and Ti/TiN/AlCu interconnect layers (Semi-Conductor Laboratory, “CMOS Fabrication Facility”). This is a description of that facility’s process, not a universal CMOS recipe.
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Do all CMOS transistors use silicon dioxide and polysilicon?
No. The words “metal” and “oxide” in CMOS’s name do not provide a complete inventory of materials for every present-day transistor. Gate materials have changed across processes. For example, Intel describes its 45 nm process as using a hafnium-based high-k dielectric in place of silicon dioxide and metal gate electrodes in place of polysilicon (Intel, “High-k and Metal Gate Transistor Research”).
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- The OV2640 image sensor has 2 million pixels (1632x1232 pixels), its small size, low operating voltage, and provides all the functions of a single UXGA camera and image processor
- It supports many parameter settings such as exposure, white balance, chroma, saturation and contrast, and supports JPEG/RGB565 format output, which can meet the needs of different occasions
- Through the control of SCCB bus, 10-bit sampling data of various resolutions can be output in the form of whole frame, sub-sampling, windowing, etc. Users can fully control image quality, data format and transmission mode
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Is every CMOS device made on silicon?
Silicon is a common foundation for CMOS manufacturing, but “CMOS” identifies a circuit and fabrication approach rather than requiring one particular substrate in its definition. Intel’s transistor explainer describes MOSFET structures built into silicon and explains the complementary nMOS/pMOS pairing (Intel Newsroom, “The Transistor, Explained”). That supports silicon as a familiar implementation, not a claim that every possible CMOS implementation must use it.
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How to think about CMOS versus silicon
- CMOS: a complementary transistor circuit and integrated-circuit technology.
- Silicon: a semiconductor material commonly used as the wafer substrate and in transistor regions.
- A CMOS chip: a manufactured device combining semiconductor regions with insulating, gate, contact, and wiring materials that vary by process.
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