EE 432 – SPECIAL SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICES

Course offered in:

Autumn 2013

Instructors:

Prof. Dipankar Saha – Excellent Prof for the course.

Motivation:

The motivation of the course is that a student, at the end should :

-LEARN! -HAVE FUN DOING SO! -Get some insightful discussion done on various devices!

This may sound different from other courses, but you can trust me the Prof makes sure he says true to this motive 🙂

Prerequisite:

There are no prerequisites as such though a sound knowledge of EE 207 can prove insightful.

Course Content and Structure:

Prof is very flexible with the course content. Broadly it can be classified into following regimes:

  1. Revision of Basics: Mostly clearing out the concepts of EE207 ,i.e., ideas involving density of states, fermi level, dimensionality of device etc are discussed so that you can apply them confidently in the future.
  2. Heterostructure Devices: HEMT (High Electron Mobility Transistor) is covered in detail.
  3. Tunneling Devices: Concept of tunneling, RTD (Resonance Tunneling Device is covered.
  4. Optical Devices: Ideology of photonics, LED and LASERs are covered.
  5. Miscellaneous Devices: This list of devices can vary a lot with factors such as your interest, your demand, Prof’s enthu, current research work, et all. In this academic session Prof covered devices such as Spintronic Devices, MESFET, JFET, etc. You can actually ask the Prof to pick up some device of your interest – kind of like creating your own curriculum, now isn’t that cool!! 🙂

The structure of the course involves a final project and may include some assignments through the course. Yup, you heard it right – no quizzes or midsem – infact no written exam at all. The prof is even flexible with the attendance!! (He is just concerned with your improved knowledge about devices at the end of the course).

Difficulty Level:

Easy. In simple words, learn and enjoy!

Grading Statistics:

Prof is also chill with grading. In our batch more than 50% of the class got AA or AB and this has been trend for past years as well. You just need to convince him in the end that your concepts are very clear on atleast 1 class of devices.

Study Material and References :

No books- another good point! Prof will provide study resources as and when required. You will have to go through some research papers through the course, but don’t worry, they will start making some sense now.

Miscellaneous:

This course was in all an awesome experience. The Prof is one of the best I have encountered. You may expect a small class but in our academic year we had a batch of 40. If you enjoyed EE207, you will simply love this course. On the other hand, if you didn’t enjoy EE207, take this course and you’ll definitely start enjoying it hereon.

Advanced courses that can be taken after this course:

This course is a high level course and you can participate in the active research going on in the devices domain in the institute after taking this course.

Review by – Pulkit Tandon (pulkit1495@gmail.com)