Fundamentals of Carrier Transport

Rating:
Summary: It's a quantum world...
Review: There was a time when all a good semiconductor device engineer had to know was the drift-diffusion, Poisson, and continuity equations to model devices, with the Boltzmann transport equation having only made a brief cameo in one's life during a grad school course in Ashcroft and Mermin or some other solid state physics book. With shrinking device dimensions, those days are gone. Lundstrom, a Purdue professor, has written a fairly understandable book (though not easy) describing energy and momentum balance, Monte Carlo methods, and other tools of transport theory. I gave it 4 stars only because I found the notation and style a bit formal for an EE (although a solid state physics student would probably be right at home). On the plus side, there are some interesting topics not normally seen. For example, I believe this may be the only in-print textbook that has a derivation of Van der Pauw's equation for resistivity measurements used in Hall mobility tests by almost every epitaxial growth engineer/scientist on a daily basis. Overall, well worth the money.