During the first decade following the invention of the transistor,
progress in semiconductor device technology advanced rapidly due to an
effective synergy of technological discoveries and physical
understanding. Through physical reasoning, a feeling for the right
assumption and the correct interpretation of experimental findings, a
small group of pioneers conceived the major analytic design equations,
which are currently to be found in numerous textbooks. Naturally with
the growth of specific applications, the description of some
characteristic properties became more complicated. For instance, in
inte- grated circuits this was due in part to the use of a wider bias
range, the addition of inherent parasitic elements and the occurrence of
multi- dimensional effects in smaller devices. Since powerful computing
aids became available at the same time, complicated situations in
complex configurations could be analyzed by useful numerical techniques.
Despite the resulting progress in device optimization, the above
approach fails to provide a required compact set of device design and
process control rules and a compact circuit model for the analysis of
large-scale electronic designs. This book therefore takes up the
original thread to some extent. Taking into account new physical effects
and introducing useful but correct simplifying assumptions, the previous
concepts of analytic device models have been extended to describe the
characteristics of modern integrated circuit devices. This has been made
possible by making extensive use of exact numerical results to gain
insight into complicated situations of transistor operation.
