Microchip Fabrication, 5th Ed.

Rating:
Summary: Good basic info, but inexcusable typos and errors
Review: English is not my first language, I still find this book painful to read. It took me a weekend to munch down the top one third of this book, a biography of Seymour Cray, and six Japanese comic books. I find this book among them, the worst prepared one.

With so many errors in it, I kept grabbing my hair. Many mistakes are so easy to spot, I can usually randomly filp over ten pages, and spot an error. Many of them are really serious, they really can mislead a student, if he/she lacked proper training in science. Say on one page, ozone was mistakenly printed as O2 rather than O3. There are some other unbalanced chemical formula as well. Some math formula are also poorly written or presented.

Read it, but be careful. It can be a mine field.

Rating:
Summary: I was not impressed
Review: I was not at all impressed with this book. I have found more information, with more clear illustrations and samples in books that are a fraction of the cost. The author makes several mistakes throughout this book regarding the fabrication of microchips. I did not find the book to be up to date as far as current standards and practices. I highly reccomend that anyone interested in this subject find a more current book. If a person is interested in fabrication techniques from 5 years ago, then this book will fit that need. If a person wants to be knowledgeable about current methods then avoid this book like the plague. I would get my money back if I could.

Rating:
Summary: It's Not As Bad As All That
Review: I'll be short in sweet. I've read some of the other revies. And let me tell you from a guy that is in the semiconductor industry, the grammatical mistakes are many but they are not enough to misguide you as to the theory contained within the text. Everyone in the industry knows that ozone is O3, so when the author uses O2 in some areas, it is an understanable mistake. I do wish the author would have included a little more of the math behind the industry, but he did afterall forewarn us that it was not going to be in here. So the book does what the title states, gives a practical guide to semiconductor processing.

Rating:
Summary: Good Read
Review: If you have or are in the process of getting your EE, don't bother with this book. As the title says, it's a "Practical Guide" for folks that either have an interest in the topic or wish to get a bit deeper into the issues involved in wafer and semiconductor manufacturing due to job requirements etc... it is not a text book.

I would have given the book 5 stars except there are several glaring issues with this book. Given the target audience and general education level of its readers, I think some of the issues are inexcusable.

Typos and grammatical errors abound in this book. The Editor at McGraw Hill must have been asleep or been so completely uninterested in the topic that they didn't bother to check. Also, there are issues with decimal point placement throughout the book. It's sufficiently technical that someone should have bothered to verify the figures before publishing. I also would like to have seen higher quality illustrations/pictures and some logic applied to their placement.

This book is due for an update SOON. It positions die shifts to 180 nanometers as an up and coming event. Intel currently has 90 nanometer manufacturing up and running, with products entering the channel in 4Q03. Not to mention, graphics chip companies and their fab partners have made the shift to 130 nanometers. These process and manufacturing changes bring a whole host of new issues, challenges, opportunities and technologies to the mix.

All in all, this is a good book.

Rating:
Summary: Great starting point
Review: This book is decent for the layperson trying to grasp the semiconductor process, but not great. Some of the examples and explanation make the topic easy to understand, but the chapters don't really flow and you are likely to get confused when the book delves into technical depth. The typos and errors are distracting and it's blatant that the book was rushed to publishing.

Rating:
Summary: Proofread it first!
Review: This book is very easy to understand on the whole. However, some aspects of the organization of the information are frustrating - in Chapter 3 for example, you are frequently directed to Chapter 11, suggesting that the book may need to be read twice.

In terms of quality, the book is abysmal. Shame on the publishers for putting it out in this form! There are typos, omissions, and grammatical errors everywhere. Also, the illustrations and tables are very poor. Some tables are too small to be legible, and the illustrations in many places are less comprehensible than the text itself. The line drawings are often quite laughable, and there are mistakes even in the illustrations.

These problems aside, the basic content is worth 4 stars. I got a wider and deeper view of semiconductors and the industry than I expected for the price.

Rating:
Summary: Good content, very poor execution
Review: This book would be a fine introduction to semiconductor processing if it were not so poorly written. The scope and depth of the material is appropriate and informative. However, the book was published without sufficient editing or, apparently, any proofreading and the result is occasionally inaccurate, often grammatically incorrect, and comically redundant throughout (the author must have been paid by the page). Find a more carefully written guide or wait for the fifth edition and hope it doesn't slip past the editor like this one did.