Academic year: Autumn 2018

Professor: Prof. Pradeep Nair

By the end of the course, one is expected to:

Have a decent understanding about the working mechanism of various electronic devices like MOSFETs, diodes. Understand the cause of various defects and how they alter the devices. EE 207 takes one into the deeper aspects of semiconductor devices and this is a must course for someone who is interested in knowing the physics behind the working of devices.

Course content and structure :

This course is about basic semiconductor devices and the physics of important semiconductor devices – MOSFET, PN Junction diodes. At least, that’s what the professor has covered. The official course content can be found here – https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/web/academics/courses/EE207 Prof. Pradeep Nair refrained himself from covering BJTs, so there can be some differences in the course contents provided by the website and that has been covered. The course content can be trisected as follows :

The first part can be summarized in 3 words(?) : Quantum and solid-state physics. Elaborating on the same, solid-state physics deals with the study of energy bands, electrons and holes behaviors in various energy levels, Fermi function. Other aspects include doping and carrier densities, carrier transport, recombination and generation and the semiconductor devices subject to some assumptions which essentially provide the complete semi-classical mathematical description of the behavior of electrons and holes in a semiconductor devices. All these provide a base for further learning. Next comes the PN junction diode, starts off with the I-V characteristics and modifying the current expression to account for the non-idealities. The professor touched upon the defects seen and some methods to circumvent such problems. The last part is all about MOSFETs and the construction from scratch. It also covers various working regions of the MOSFET and the respective I-V characteristics.

Marks distribution and grading stats :

The professor adopted a policy of conducting a mini-quiz every week so students remain on their toes. In the end, best 8 quiz marks were taken for evaluation of the grades weighing 25%. The quizzes were not very hard, but helped in the understanding some approximations taken in formulae and other aspects. Apart from these quizzes, the professor had given an assignment which involved some simulations by experimenting on the PN junction diode and comparing the simulation values with the actual calculated values with proper reasoning. The simulations were carried out on the Nanohub Simulation tool which can be found on www.nanohub.com. This accounted for 5% of the marks. Midsem had a weightage of 20% leaving 50% for the endsem.

Grading stats : Neither too lenient nor too harsh. It was pretty much balanced. Check out asc for the grade-wise distribution.

Difficulty :

Medium. Again, depends on how well a student grasps all the conditions and assumptions made. Self study and some reference texts should be useful.

Prerequisites : As such, there are no prerequisites for this course. It’s good if one has some knowledge about the devices though. So, EE-112 or EE-101 should be more than enough.

Miscellaneous :

The professor hasn’t given any questions for practice. So, the only practice has happened during the quizzes. Some reference books which are super helpful for this course –

Semiconductor Device Fundamentals by Robert F Pierret.

Advanced Semiconductor Device Fundamentals by Robert F Pierret.