Temperature effects

When the temperature of the conductor increases, the collisions between electrons and ions increase. Thus as a substance heats up because of electricity flowing through it (or by any heating process), the resistance will usually increase. The exception is semiconductors. The resistance of an ohmic substance depends on temperature in the following way:


where T is its temperature, T0 is a reference temperature (usually room temperature), R0 is the resistance at T0, and α is the percentage change in resistivity per unit temperature. The constant α depends only on the material being considered. The relationship stated is actually only an approximate one, the true physics being somewhat non-linear, or looking at it another way, α itself varies with temperature. For this reason it is usual to specify the temperature that α was measured at with a suffix, such as α15 and the relationship only holds in a range of temperatures around the reference.[10]

Intrinsic semiconductors exhibit the opposite temperature behavior, becoming better conductors as the temperature increases. This occurs because the electrons are bumped to the conduction energy band by the thermal energy, where they can flow freely and in doing so they leave behind holes in the valence band which can also flow freely.

Extrinsic semiconductors have much more complex temperature behaviour. First the electrons (or holes) leave the donors (or acceptors) giving a decreasing resistance. Then there is a fairly flat phase in which the semiconductor is normally operated where almost all of the donors (or acceptors) have lost their electrons (or holes) but the number of electrons that have jumped right over the energy gap is negligible compared to the number of electrons (or holes) from the donors (or acceptors). Finally as the temperature increases further the carriers that jump the energy gap becomes the dominant figure and the material starts behaving like an intrinsic semiconductor