SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICES: FUNDAMENTALS, PHYSICS, AND APPLICATIONS: From Carrier Transport to Circuit Design — Diodes, Transistors, and Integrated Circuits Explained

There is a gap in the way semiconductor devices are usually taught, and most students fall into it at least once.

On one side sits the physics: Schrödinger's equation, band structure, Fermi–Dirac statistics, the continuity equations. Rigorous, beautiful, and — to a student who wants to design something — entirely disconnected from the object in front of them. On the other side sits the circuit: the transistor as a three-terminal element with a small-signal model and a set of design equations that arrive fully formed and unexplained. That treatment is immediately useful and quietly corrosive, because the moment a device behaves in a way the model does not predict — and it will — the engineer has nothing to fall back on.

SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICES: FUNDAMENTALS, PHYSICS, AND APPLICATIONS closes that gap in one continuous argument. It begins with the crystal and ends with a fabricated integrated circuit, and every step in between is derived rather than asserted. When the threshold voltage expression appears in Chapter 11, it is not handed down — it is assembled from the surface potential, the depletion charge, the oxide capacitance, and the work-function difference, each of which the reader has already met.

Sixteen chapters in three movements:

Chapters 1–5 build the physical toolkit — crystal structure and Miller indices, quantum foundations and the Kronig–Penney origin of the bandgap, effective mass and density of states, Fermi–Dirac statistics and doping, drift and diffusion, mobility and scattering, velocity saturation, the Hall effect, Shockley–Read–Hall and Auger recombination, and the continuity equations.

Chapters 6–13 develop the devices — the p–n junction at equilibrium and under bias, the depletion approximation and Poisson's equation, the Shockley diode equation, junction capacitance, avalanche and Zener breakdown, Schottky barriers and ohmic contacts, heterojunctions and the two-dimensional electron gas, bipolar transistors from Gummel number to Ebers–Moll, the Early effect and the Kirk effect, hybrid-π small-signal models and cutoff frequency, the MOS capacitor and C–V characteristics, MOSFET operation from the gradual channel approximation through subthreshold conduction and the 60 mV/decade limit, Dennard scaling, DIBL, punchthrough, FinFET and gate-all-around.

Chapters 14–16 turn to application — photodetectors, solar cells and the Shockley–Queisser limit, LEDs and laser diodes; power devices including superjunctions, IGBTs, thyristors, and wide-bandgap SiC and GaN; and a closing chapter on how any of these devices is actually fabricated, integrated, and measured.

Written to be worked, not skimmed. Every chapter opens with learning objectives phrased as capabilities. Derivations show their intermediate steps, including the algebraically tedious ones, because the step a first pass skips is usually the step the reader needed. Worked examples appear in bordered boxes with units carried through every line. Practice problems progress from direct application to multi-step analysis to design, with a full boxed answer key and a complete worked-solutions appendix. Assumptions are stated where they are made and revisited where they fail.

Includes a chapter dependency map so a reader with a specific destination can navigate directly — a MOS-only route, a photovoltaics route, and a process-engineering route are each laid out explicitly.

Written for upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students taking a semiconductor devices course, and for the practicing engineer: the circuit designer who needs to know why a model has the form it does, the process engineer who needs the device consequence of a fabrication choice, the systems engineer evaluating a technology.

Multivariable calculus, differential equations, Gauss's law, and circuit analysis are assumed. Quantum mechanics is not — Chapter 2 builds exactly what band theory requires, from the beginning.

Includes physical constants, silicon and compound semiconductor material properties, Caughey–Thomas mobility parameters, a mathematical reference, a full symbol list, glossary, and index.

Whether you are sitting a devices course, moving from circuits into physics, or trying to understand why the model in front of you has the shape it does, this book derives every result in front of you — so you can check it yourself.

From the crystal to the integrated circuit.

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