Section 6.

3: Special Unit Cells

Technology typically uses semiconductor materials having a diamond-like structure.

The crystal has a face centered cubic lattice with a two atom basis. The atomic basis
consists of the same atom for silicon while it has two different atoms for GaAs.
Subsequent sections will show the corresponding reciprocal lattice is the body centered
cubic lattice. The basic structure results from the approximate 110 degree angle the bonds
have with respect to each other. This section covers a number of common lattice types.

Topic 6.3.1: Body Centered Cubic (BCC) Lattice

The body centered cubic (BCC) cell takes its name

from the topology of its conventional unit cell.
Conventional unit cells typically have orthogonal
spanning vectors and can contain more than a single
lattice point unlike the primitive cells. The BCC
conventional cell encloses a total of two points (and two
clusters when assigned basis atoms) with one of them
located at the center of the cube as shown in Figure
6.3.1. The volume of the BCC conventional cell has
twice the volume of the primitive cell for this lattice. Figure 6.3.1: Three conventional
The figure shows three body-centered cubic (BCC) unit cells for the body-centered
unit cells. The cells have length “a” along all sides. The cubic lattice.
conventional spanning vectors can be written as
! ! !
a1c = ax" a c2 = ay" a 3c = az" (6.3.1)
where the “c” superscript indicates “conventional”. The spanning vectors should not be
confused with the basis vectors that span the three-dimensional space nor with the
primitive vectors. The primitive vectors for the BCC lattice can be written in terms of the
unit vectors
! a ! a ! a
a1 = ( x" + y" − z" ) a 2 = ( − x" + y" + z" ) a 3 = ( x" − y" + z" ) (6.3.2)
2 2 2
We can verify that the BCC conventional cell has twice the volume of the primitive
! ! !
cell. The volume enclosed by arbitrary vectors a, b, c has the form
! ! !
(
V = a ⋅ b×c ) (6.3.3)
! ! ! ! !
We want V = a1 ⋅ ( a 2 × a 3 ) . Calculating a 2 × a 3

x" y" z"

"
2 x y" z" 2
! ! a a a a a " a2
a2 × a3 = − =   −1 1 1 =   [ 2x − (−2)y + 0z ] = ( x" + y" )
" "
2 2 2 2  2 2
1 −1 1
a a a
−
2 2 2
The enclosed volume must be

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 ! ! ! a3
V = a1 ⋅ ( a 2 × a 3 ) =
2
which is half the volume of the conventional cell a3.

Topic 6.3.2: Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) Lattice

The Face Centered Cubic (FCC) cell has primitive

vectors given by
! a ! !
a 1 = (x̂ + ŷ ) a 2 = (ŷ + ẑ ) a 2 = (ẑ + x̂ ) (6.3.4)
a a
2 2 2
An atom or a cluster of atoms occupies the eight corners
of the cube and the center of each of the four faces.
Keep in mind that the cell contains only 1/8 of each
corner point and ½ of each face point. Therefore, as
indicated as in Figure 6.3.2, the conventional cell
contains exactly four lattice points or 4 atomic clusters Figure 6.3.2: The Face-Centered
for the crystal. Cubic (FCC) Lattice.

Topic 6.3.3: The Wigner-Seitz Primitive Cell

The Wigner-Seitz primitive cell encloses an entire

lattice point (or atomic basis) along with all of the
volume closest to that point as shown in Figure 6.3.3.
Besides being conceptually convenient, it is important
for the reciprocal lattice (i.e., the
! lattice of the Fourier
transform variable such as k ). The Wigner-Seitz
primitive cell surrounding a given lattice point can be
found by
(1) drawing a dotted line from the central point to all
other points in the lattice (usually nearest neighbor Figure Cell.
6.3.3: The Wigner Seitz
points as shown in the figure),
(2) draw planes (solid lines) perpendicular to the dotted lines (i.e., planes with a normal
that is parallel to the line),
(3) collect all of the space within the interior of the volume formed by the planes. Figure
6.3.3 shows an example for the two-dimensional lattice with the shaded region depicting
the Wigner-Seitz cell.

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Topic 6.3.4: The Diamond and Zinc Blende Lattice

The diamond and zinc blende

structures have an underlying FCC
lattice with a two-atom basis. The
diamond structure has all identical
atoms (such as carbon). Zinc Blende
differs from the diamond structure only
because the basis contains two different
atoms such as gallium and arsenic. It
bears repeating that both the diamond Figure 6.3.4: Two representations of the zinc
and zinc blende structures require a two- blende structure.
atom basis. For diamond, both atoms
are identical whereas for zinc blende, the two are different. For clarity, we discuss the
zinc blende structure for GaAs.
The left side of Figure 6.3.4 shows an FCC lattice with atoms in an atomic basis
connected by arrows. The structure consists of two FCC lattices with one shifted along
the body diagonal by a fraction of the lattice constant of 3 / 4 . The basic structure can
most easily be seen in the right-hand side of the figure (the distances are distorted for
clarity). Technically, GaAs has the zincblende (or sometimes called the cubic zinc
sulfide) structure. The zincblende lattice is identical to that of the diamond except one of
the carbon atoms in the atomic cluster is replaced by gallium and the other is replaced
with arsenic. For example, the dark atoms in the above right-hand figure might be the
gallium while the lighter ones might be arsenic. The table below provides examples of
the zincblende structure with the lattice spacing “a” in angstroms.

Crystal a Crystal a Cyrstal a

AlP 5.45 GaP 5.45 InP 5.87

AlAs 5.62 GaAs 5.65 InAs 6.04
AlSb 6.13 GaSb 6.12 InSb 6.48

Topic 6.3.5: Connection between Tetrahedral Bonding and the Diamond Structure

Also include the figure in the lectures: movie

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