Any of a number of semiconductor materials can be and are used, indeed the first transistor was actually a Germanium (Ge) transistor. the real reason why Si is so dominant comes down to 4 principal reasons ( but #1 is the primary reason):
1) It forms an oxide that is of very high high quality, seals the surface with very few pin holes or gaps.
- this allows gap MOSFET to be more easily made as the SiO2 forms the insulating layer for the Gate,
- SiO2 has been called the chip designers friend.
2) It forms a very tough Nitride, Si3N4 Silicon Nitride forms a very high bandgap insulator which is impermeable.
- this is used to passivate (seal) the die.
- this also used to make hard masks and in other process steps
3) Si has a very nice bandgap of ~ 1.12 eV, not too high so that room temperature can't ionize it, and not so low that it has to high leakage current.
4) it forms a very nice gate material. Most modern FET's used in VLSI (up until the latest generations) have been called MOSFET but in actual fact have used Si as the gate material. It turns out that it is very easy to deposited non-crystalline Si on surfaces and it is easily etched to great precision.
Basically the success of Si is the success of MOSFET, which with scaling and extreme integration has driven the industry. Mosfet's are not so easily manufactured in other material systems, and you can't drive the same level of integration in other semicondcutors.
GeO2 - is partially soluble
GaAs - does not form a oxide
CO2 - is a gas
Semiconductors are used because with selective contamination (called dopants) you can control the properties of the material and tailor it's operation and operational mechanisms.
Two immediate modes of failure are over-voltage and over-current.
- If you have a high impedance input like a gate to a mosfet, then high voltage (even at very low current) will cause a puncture in the capacitive gate of the mosfet as the electrons have enough energy to cause the dielectric to breakdown. Once this occurs, the resistance of the input drops to near nothing and a later low-voltage high-current will further heat up and destroy the mosfet. This mode of failure is why there is ESD protection on many chips.
- Over-current causes over heating of the device. Once temperatures get high enough to start changing the structure and/or burning of the internal semiconductors, it will start acting funny, working less efficiently, or completely failing as an open or short.
It's possible that you could think of reverse voltage as another failure mechanism, but generally that still falls under one of the other two categories, it's just different to think about. For instance, if someone reverses a power supply on a circuit with a diode in it, they may expect no current through the diode and instead get an over-current condition because the diode would now be forward biased.
Note that capacitors, resistors and inductors (and any other circuit element) are likely to be damaged in similar ways as transistor ICs, i.e. over-current and/or over-voltage.
Other failure modes of electronics in general may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_modes_of_electronics
Best Answer
What is the purpose of the packaging?
And what are the materials that IC packages are made of
The leadframe: tinned copper or metal so that it can be soldered easily
The black part: usually molded plastic, sometimes a ceramic material.
Some ICs can be bought in a CSP (Chip Scaled Package) which actually means no real package at all, on top of the chip a redistribution layer is made (which spaces the connections to what the PCB can use) and the IC is then mounted directly on the PCB. This technique is also called "flip chip".