Integrated Circuit Design

There are several excellent textbooks available that treat Integrated Circuit (IC) Design at a level appropriate to final year students, to practising designers or to postgraduates. Some of these advanced texts have an 'engineering' bias, and give a detailed treatment of the technology underlying integrated circuits. Others have a 'computer' science systems' leaning, concentrate on methods of IC design, and do not discuss the underlying technology beyond the barest fundamentals. These textbooks are all expensive, and their use is only justified in an advanced course, where they form one of the major (or even the major) text for the course.
Integrated circuit technology has now reached a stage of maturity where it forms an integral part of most undergraduate courses in Electrical Engineering, and indeed many Computer Science and Physics courses. It is therefore no longer appropriate to leave lC design as merely a 'final year option'. It is neces- sary to introduce the subject at a much earlier stage via a 'primer' course, leaving advanced material to a later course, which only enthusiasts need attend. There is at present no inexpensive text suitable for introducing pre-final year (or younger) undergraduates to IC Design, and it is irresponsible to recommend an advanced text for an introductory course. This book is intended to be a 'first' book of IC design that can stand alone as a text for non-specialists, or can lead to a more advanced course in a subsequent year of study.
The first chapter of the book puts the development of microelectronics in historical perspective, so that its meteoric pace may be appreciated. The focus of the book is on design, and the technological details are restricted to those essential to performing and understanding a simple IC design. However, the book is intended to be a true introduction, which would be incomplete without some underlying details. We have assumed only a knowledge of elementary Boolean algebra, of the barest details of electron/hole physics, and of simple linear circuit analysis (Ohm's Law!). The book is therefore self.contained for the reader who understands these fundamentals. From this basis, the physics of MOS transistor
devices is discussed in chapter 2, in a simplified form appropriate to what we need to get out of it at this stage.