Device Physics: Volume 4

The first edition of this volume was published 12 years ago. Since many of the devices described in it were invented 20 years or more earlier, it might have been thought that the field had reached maturity. However, the power of semiconductor physics and the ingenuity of device designers has demonstrated to the contrary. Semiconductor devices have changed so markedly in the intervening decade that this volume is effectively a new book in its own right. Less than one-third of the old material remains, and that, naturally, is largely the fundamental physics. The descriptions of devices are unique and original in each case.The basic layout of the volume is unchanged, and most of the original chapter authors have personally made many of the new advances in design and performance which they describe, as well as incorporating overviews of world progress, in both the context of traditional practice and the latest discoveries. There are two significant changes in this new edition. The progress in the physics of panel electroluminescence no longer justifies an entire chapter. Whereas superlattices have become so significant recently that the last chapter summarises this field, reporting on the latest advances in preparing semiconductor layers on an atomic scale. The volume includes descriptions of all today's important semiconductor devices, at a level appropriate to the physicist or engineer who is not an expert on that particular device.