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Rating: 
Summary: Clean exposition of CMOS circuit design
Review: I happened across this book at the local engineering library while looking for books to brush up on CMOS design. This was my favorite of several books I checked out. Professor Maloberti has taught a CMOS class in Italy for many years, and this is essentially the text of his course. The explanation in the book bears the marks of someone who has explained the topic many times and revised his explanation so that only the important parts remain and are presented in logical sequence. It is not an enclopedia of CMOS layout and circuits, like Baker's two books. It covers fewer topics but goes into more depth on each one. The level is that of a first semester graduate course in CMOS, not for absolute beginners, but anyone with undergrad courses in electronics (like Sedra and Smith) ought to be able to follow Maloberti without a problem. The explanations are both quantitative and qualitative. He develops equations but also explains circuit behavior from an intuitive point of view. Even circuit topologies that are not obvious at first glance, like the folded cascode, become clear after Maloberti takes you through the predessor circuits. He has quite a few examples conducted in Spice throughout the text. I find the examples are quite helpful both in gaining insight into how to similate CMOS circuits, and in getting calibrated on realistic circuit behavior. Although it is not a book on layout, he does give quite a few examples of representative layouts for different circuit elements and topologies. The only reason I don't give it five stars is that English is obviously a second language for the author. Sometimes the English gets in the way of the exposition. However, if you stop and think for a minute, the context almost always makes clear what he is saying. Kluwer could have fixed this easily by having a native speaker edit the text. Perhaps they will in a future edition. Overall, I highly recommend Maloberti as an introduction and reference text on CMOS. I think it is the one I will keep coming back to for reference in future design.
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