PH 863 - Electronic Materials and Devices

• Be able to describe the crystallographic structure of typical elemental and compound semiconductor materials
• Be able to use Miller indices to specify sets of planes in a crystal, to denote crystallographic directions, and to calculate the distance between planes of atoms in a cubic crystal
• Be able to describe the different crystal imperfections such as point defects, and to understand how lattice vibrations influence the mobilities of free charges
• Be able to describe the essential features of the energy band theory of solids
• Be able to determine the concentration of electrons in the conduction band of an intrinsic semiconductor and obtain a mathematical expression for the electrical conductivity of an intrinsic semiconductor in terms of electron and hole mobilities and the forbidden energy gap for the material
• Be able to explain how to add appropriately chosen impurities to a pure semiconductor to obtain an n or p-type extrinsic semiconductor
• Be able to calculate the location of the Fermi level and draw and label an energy band diagram for an intrinsic or for an n or p-type extrinsic semiconductor
• Be able to qualitatively explain the main features of a p-n junction and quantitatively determine the electric and potential fields in the depletion region, the barrier potential, the junction capacitance, and the I-V characteristics for a p-n junction
• Be able to explain the design and operation of semiconductor p-n junction devices, including rectifier diodes, varactor diodes, light-emitting diodes, solar cells, bipolar junction transistors, junction field effect transistors and insulated gate field effect transistors
• Be able to explain the principles of integrated circuit design and show how advances in the design of the integrated devices influences the ability to increase the scale of integration to increase the number of components per chip and to increase the switching speeds for the field-effect transistors on the chip

• Electric and magnetic field theory
• Modern physics including elementary wave mechanics
• Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution functions

• Crystal Structure (3 classes)
• Energy Band Theory of Solids (4 classes)
• Intrinsic and Extrinsic Conductivity of Semiconductors (5 classes)
• p-n Junction Theory (9 classes)
• Semiconductor Devices (7 classes)
• Integrated Circuits (2 classes)