Book Description

Microelectronics is the cornerstone of the information technologies that pervade virtually every aspect of contemporary life. It is difficult to imagine any field of science or technology that has had a more profound impact on the latter half of the 20 century than microelectronics. Microelectronics industry has been able to provide transistors, chips and products that are becoming smaller, faster, cheaper and better every year. As transistors become smaller, they become faster, more and more of such transistors can be packed on a chip, and thus chips are able to store and process more information. Digital circuits are made from analog components. The design must assure that the analog nature of the components doesn't dominate the desired digital behaviour. Digital systems must manage noise and timing margins, parasitic inductances and capacitances, and filter power connections. Bad designs have intermittent problems such as "e;glitches"e;, vanishingly-fast pulses that may trigger some logic but not others, "e;runt pulses"e; that do not reach valid "e;threshold"e; voltages, or unexpected ("e;undecoded"e;) combinations of logic states. A digital circuit is often constructed from small electronic circuits called logic gates that can be used to create combinational logic. Each logic gate represents a function of boolean logic. A logic gate is an arrangement of electrically controlled switches, better known as transistors. Each logic symbol is represented by a different shape. This book is designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students with background knowledge in basic electronics including biasing, modeling, circuit, analysis, and frequency response.