Band-gap extraction from intrinsic carrier activation

For fixed band effective masses and band gap $E_g$, the intrinsic carrier concentration obeys $n_i=C{T}^{3/2}{e}^{-E_g/(2k_{B}T)}$. ThusA base-ten plot against $x=1000\mathrm{K}/T$ instead has slope $-E_g/(2000k_B\mathrm{K}\ln 10)$ after the prefactor correction. The intrinsic branch must be used, rather than the extrinsic plateau or dopant freeze-out branch. A changing gap or effective mass makes this an activation-energy estimate, and a small gap uncertainty can produce a much larger multiplicative uncertainty in a room-temperature minority density.