Fundamentals of Solid State Engineering

Book Preface

Solid State Engineering is a multi-disciplinary field that combines disciplines such as physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It provides the means to understand matter and to design and control its properties.

The century has witnessed the phenomenal rise of Natural Science and Technology into all aspects of human life. Three major sciences have emerged and marked this century, as shown in Fig. A: Physical Science which has strived to understand the structure of atoms through quantum mechanics, Life Science which has attempted to understand the structure of cells and the mechanisms of life through biology and genetics, and Information Science which has symbiotically developed the communicative and computational means to advance Natural Science.

Microelectronics has become one of today’s principle enabling technologies supporting these three major sciences and touches every aspect of human life, as illustrated in Fig. B: food, energy, transportation, communication, entertainment, health/medicine and exploration. For example, microelectronic devices have now become building blocks of systems which are used to monitor food safety and pollution, produce electricity (solar cells) or use energy more efficiently (LED), control electrical vehicles (automobiles), transmit information (optical fiber and wireless communications), entertain (virtual reality, video games, computers), help cure or enhance the human body (artificial senses, optically activated medicine) and support the exploration of new realms (space, underwater).

Although impressive progress has been achieved, microelectronics is still far from being able to imitate Nature in terms of integration density, functionality and performance. For example, a state-of-the-art low power Pentium II processor consumes nearly twice as much power as a human brain, while it has 1000 times fewer transistors than the number of cells in a human brain (Fig. C). Forecasts show that the current microelectronics technology is not expected to reach similar levels because of its physical limitations.