Fundamentals Of Electronic Materials And Devices: A Gentle Introduction To The Quantum-classical World

The Romans built enduring bridges with a working knowledge of mechanics and materials, while today's bridge building is an elaborate enterprise involving CAD tools, composite materials, and acoustic imaging. The semiconductor industry is forced to explore alternate platforms such as 2-D materials, spintronics, analog processing, and quantum engineering due to the prohibitive cost of computing and the slowdown of chip manufacturing. This book combines top-down classical device physics with bottom-up quantum transport to provide the basis for such a scientific exploration.

Format: Hardback
Length: 348 pages
Publication date: 23 February 2023
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd

Before Newton, the Romans constructed long-lasting bridges with a working understanding of mechanics and materials. Today's bridge construction is a complex process that involves CAD tools, composite materials, and acoustic imaging. When technology reaches its limits, a basic understanding becomes insufficient, and an in-depth understanding of core physical principles, both macroscopic and microscopic, top-down and bottom-up, becomes essential. We find ourselves at a similar crossroads in semiconductor device technology, where a working knowledge of solid-state electronics is no longer sufficient. Faced with the high cost of computing and the slowdown of chip manufacturing, device scaling, and the global supply chain, the semiconductor industry is exploring alternative platforms such as 2-D materials, spintronics, analog processing, and quantum engineering.

This book combines top-down classical device physics with bottom-up quantum transport in a single venue to provide a foundation for such scientific exploration. It is an essential and easy-to-read text for beginning undergraduate and practicing graduate students, physicists unfamiliar with device engineering, and engineers untrained in quantum physics. With a modest pre-requisite of freshman mathematics, the book covers a wide range of topics, from chemical bonding to Hofstader butterflies, domain walls to Chern insulators, solar cells to photodiodes, FinFETs to Majorana fermions. For the practicing device engineer, it introduces new concepts such as the quantum of resistance, while for the practicing quantum physicist, it provides new contexts such as the tunnel transistor.

ISBN-13: 9789811265952