Academic Year –

Autumn 2013

Course Instructor –

Prof. Swaroop Ganguly

Motivation for this course –

This course is an extension of the DIC – EE 112 – Introduction to Electronics. This course will help you develop an in-depth understanding of the physics behind electronic devices and will provide you the basic tools to go deeper into the subject in future courses. If you are curious about how electronic devices are developed and why they work as they do, then this is the course for you. Who knows, this might be the first step in the path of you becoming a Device Physicist!

Pre-requisites –

There are no hard pre-requisites for this course.

Course Content –

  • Crystal Properties – Crystal Lattices, Periodic Structures, Cubic Lattices, Planes and Directions, Diamond Lattice
  • Quantum Mechanics – Schrodinger Wave Equation, Potential Well Problem, Tunneling
  • Energy Bands and Charge Carriers in semiconductors – Bonding forces in solids, Effective mass, Electrons and Holes in Quantum Wells, Carrier Concentration Dependencies, Carrier Drift in Electric and Magnetic fields , Hall effect
  • Excess Carriers – Carrier Lifetime, Diffusion of Carriers, Recombination, Haynes-Shockley Experiment, Quasi-Fermi Levels
  • Junctions – Equilibrium conditions, Biased junctions, Steady State conditions, Transient conditions, Metal-Semiconductor junctions
  • Field-Effect Transistors – Transistor operation, Junction FET, Metal Semiconductor FET, MOSFET

Lectures –

It is important that you are up to date with whatever is going on in the course, or else, lectures can be very difficult to follow as the syllabus is vast. If you don’t understand something in class, it is imperative that you spend some time before the next lecture and clear your doubts, or else, you’ll end up not being able to follow any of the subsequent lectures. Slides will be provided, but, just going through them won’t be sufficient. You would have to refer to the books suggested below. In short, being regular in class and self study is a must if you want to do well in this course.

Assignments and Tutorials –

There were a few non-graded assignments distributed over the length of the course which covered some of the concepts covered in class and tutorials were conducted as and when students needed it.

Exams –

The course instructor followed a best 3 out of 4 quizzes system which accounted for 60% of the weightage. The endsem had a 40% weightage. Exams were very challenging due to the conceptual nature of the questions. Just practising the assignment or textbook problems won’t guarantee a good performance. You need to have a thorough understanding of the syllabus to be able to solve the questions. Time is certainly not an issue, as you have 1 hr, on an average, for each question.

Difficulty –

Moderately Difficult.

Grading –

Grading was lenient.

Study Material and References –

  • D. A. Neamen, Semiconductor Physics and Devices (IRWIN), Times Mirror High Education Group, Chicago)1997
  • E.S. Yang, Microelectronic Devices, McGraw Hill, Singapore, 1988
  • B.G. Streetman, Solid State Electronic Devices, Prentice Hall of India, New Delhi, 1995
  • J. Millman and A. Grabel, Microelectronics, McGraw Hill, International, 1987. A.S. Sedra and K.C. Smith, Microelectronic Circuits, Saunder’s College Publishing, 1991
  • R.T. Howe and C.G. Sodini, Microelectronics : An integrated Approach, Prentice Hall International, 1997

Advanced Courses that can be taken up after this course –

The concepts learnt in this course would be really helpful in courses like

  • EE 432 – Special Semiconductor Devices
  • EE 620 – Physics of Transistors

Review by -

Akhil Shetty (akh9066@gmail.com)