Fundamentals of Microelectronics, 2nd Edition

With the advances in the semiconductor and communication industries, it has become increasingly important for electrical engineers to develop a good understanding of microelectronics. This book addresses the need for a text that teaches microelectronics from a modern and intuitive perspective. Guided by my industrial, research, and academic experience, I have chosen the topics, the order, and the depth and breadth so as to efficiently impart analysis and design principles that the students will find useful as they enter the industry or graduate school.

One salient feature of this book is its synthesis- or design-oriented approach. Rather than pulling a circuit out of a bag and trying to analyze it, I set the stage by stating a problem that we face in real life (e.g., how to design a cellphone charger). I then attempt to arrive at a solution using basic principles, thus presenting both failures and successes in the process. When we do arrive at the final solution, the student has seen the exact role of each device as well as the logical thought sequence behind synthesizing the circuit.

Another essential component of this book is “analysis by inspection.” This “mentality” is created in two steps. First, the behavior of elementary building blocks is formulated using a “verbal” description of each analytical result (e.g., “looking into the emitter, we see 1/g_m.”). Second, larger circuits ...