Customer Reviews

Principles of Electronic Materials and Devices with CD-ROM

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kasap offers a book well suited for an undergraduate engineer, who needs a comprehensive text of semiconductors and related electronic materials. The level of physics and maths required is moderate - one year or so of freshman courses.

The important materials are explained. Silicon, gallium arsenide and others. Kasap also provides many diagrams to illustrate key ideas. Plus, this is clearly meant as a student's textbook. Many examples of problems are worked through. To some students, this may be the clearest way to understand and apply ideas.

Kasap also found ways to greatly simplify standard mathematical treatments. Expands significantly the size of the audience who can appreciate the ease of understanding. Because a longstanding issue in materials science has been that texts were often written by physicists, for physicists or physics majors. Often leaving them too abstruse for engineering students, who also had a need for comprehending the same ideas.

I used this textbook as an undergrad and thoroughly enjoyed using it. I feel this text is very complete and self-contained. It is very accessible and assumes no background knowledge (other than elementary physics and some calculus) in the area of materials and devices. As other commenters have pointed out, this book fills a need for *engineering* students who need to know some basic materials and solid state physics at a level that they can intuitively as well as quantitatively understand and deal with electronic devices (i.e. not at the level of a condensed matter physics student) for practical real-world applications [which this text emphasizes].

It should be noted that it is not written as for advanced graduate devices courses so you should not expect it to be updated every year with every proposed device design -- rather, this text serves to explain a breadth of devices and device properties at a more basic level so that a reader who understands this text could access current electronic devices literature and understand it fairly easily. This leads to another positive feature which is that [like most books worth owning] it is not updated every year just to make money at the printing press. Significant care has been taken to craft this book so that it does not need to be updated relentlessly -- although some new device designs in a future edition wouldn't hurt (particularly since FinFETs will likely last a while in the FET arena).

The variety of useful figures, worked examples (with realistic values), and careful explanations on such a large amount of material (no pun intended) make this an excellent textbook for engineering students interested to learn about electronic materials and devices.

Easy to read, full of examples, and effective problem sets. My top choice for any undergraduate MSE course on semiconductor theory and devices.

This is a much admired book, for all the excellent insights it offers to engineering students. I would have to work very hard to extract this number of insights from most books on solid-state physics written by physicists.

The author very effectively presents electronic materials in ways that appeal to electrical engineers, leading to the operation of semiconductor devices. The chapters on magnetic and dielectric materials are a welcome bonus.

As a beginner in the material science field, I feel more comfortable with reading this book than the others. It illustrates basic material in a simplified but a clear way. However, most other books in applied material science focus on math and physics, which is too profound and not so friendly for any beginners who try to explore this field.

It's a great text book. I love it.

This is one of the best books I have read on applied Materials Science. I found it particularly useful for electrical, electronic and computer engineering students.

The author gets to the point effortlessly, addressing only basic materials concepts necessary to conceptualize a main subject. Then, to complement and deepen the understanding of each subject convenient problems are sprinkled throughout the text.

Yet, the book is intense. The student needs to be focused and ready to absorb the wealth of themes presented in a structured manner. And this leads me to another interesting book feature:

I may sound like an old-fashioned professor, but I do dislike most Materials Science & Engineering textbooks that use color figures to enhance (they think) the learning. False: Colors only serve the publisher as an excuse to raise the book price through the roof. Students need to get exposed to regular scientific, professional documents where only sparsely color figures are used (very purposefully). Kasap's textbook doesn't need that expensive perk to be clear and thorough; all figures are clear-cut without unnecessary coloring.

For instructors, the book includes a CD that DOES help and with neatly arranged slide presentations. This is particularly useful in the instruction of electrical behavior of materials and solid state physics concepts used in the resolution of the accompanying problems.

All in all, this is one of the best books on applied Materials Science that I have encountered. The price is high even for an excellent textbook as this one. That's my only complaint.

As a research scientist working in the US industry I found this book to be immensely valuable. It has the best diagrams, illustrations and photos I have ever seen any book. It has been prepared with dedication. It is full of practical examples and very clear explanations. The only possible drawback is that the answers are not given to problems unless one is an instructor. I also like the additional chapters and solved problems on the CDROM and on the books website. These additional chapters are full of practical examples as well and extremely useful.

This book is pretty easy to follow...It presents the information in a concise way and provides decent example problems...the only set back is that there are no answers or solutions at the back of the book, making it hard to check your work to see if you're doing the problems correctly

As a research scientist working in the US industry (private sector), I found this book to be an incredibly well prepared textbook on electronic materials and devices. It is written exceptionally clearly with numerous illustrations, photos and examples. I loves some of the photos. There is no shortage of engineering problems with practical importance. I cannot find any faults at all.

This is the BEST book that I had used for courses as electronic materials and devices. The book provides a very thorough discussions on broad topics related to materials and devices, such as thermal, quantum, solid-state physics, and semiconductors (Extremely GOOD!!!) and material properties, etc. It is very well designed for a student with an engineering background, like me, to understand the physics with no troubles.

I also think the author has excellent writing skills, which explains the concepts with such immense clarity, fluidity, and makes the book very easy to understand and enjoyable to read. It also accompanied with lots and lots of interesting and practical examples and some excellent historical photographs. The CD came with the book contains the colored diagrams in every chapter, which definitely helped me understood the concepts in a more intuitive way. After all, it becomes one of the very important references on my shelf in my graduate study. This book is also very popular in China, as it has been translated into Chinese to accommodated the need for people who are eager to read, but hard to catch in English.

I think it is the best choice for you, if you want to enjoy the journey in learning Electronic materials and devices! Good Luck!