Can someone tell me? Any design that I have seen using a silicone junction for temperature sensing always uses a transistor with the base tied to the collector.
It's silicon, btw. Silicone is used for implants and sealants.
Diodes are designed to handle significantly higher currents than base-emitter junctions, thus resulting in a much smaller region of linear operation. EB junctions can have up to 6 decades of linear behavior as a function of current and are considered to be closer to an "ideal" diode than packaged diodes.