Significance
As the table shows, III-V compounds based on GaAs and InSb have far smaller effective masses than tetrahedral group IV materials like Si and Ge. In the simplest Drude picture of electronic transport, the maximum obtainable charge carrier velocity is inversely proportional to the effective mass: where with being the electronic charge. The ultimate speed of integrated circuits depends on the carrier velocity, so the low effective mass is the fundamental reason that GaAs and its derivatives are used instead of Si in high-bandwidth applications like cellular telephony.
Read more about this topic: Effective Mass (solid-state Physics)
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