Electronic Devices and Circuits Engineering Sciences 154

 
To extent the classical, simple fluid model of electrical conductivity to semiconductors and insulators, image a pipeline system made of two horizontal pipes joined by a series small vertical tubes as depicted below:

I argue that fluid flow in this pipe system may be taken as a model of semiconductor conduction: (Important point to be established)

First, the model:

Model of an Insulating or Intrinsic Semiconductor

Consider two canonical mechanisms for obtaining fluid flow or "conductivity":

Mechanisms of Carrier Excitation 

Semiconductor devices:

PN -Homojunction or Rectifying Junction

The bottom line is that the fluid level in these fluid flow systems plays the same role as the Fermi energy in understanding  the mechanisms of semiconductor conductivity.