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Book Review: Introduction to Semiconductor Circuit Design

This textbook is intended for students in Universities and Technical Colleges who have no previous knowledge of transistors or of transistor circuits. The treatment is appropriate to the second and third years of an Electronics course in a British University although the book may well prove useful to post-graduates, particularly where the first degree was obtained in a subject other than Electrical Engineering. The author, Professor Comer, is in the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada and he has special interests in computer design. The book is mainly concerned with engineering applications so that the physical aspects of semiconductor devices are allocated relatively little space. The first chapters cover the PN junction and the junction transistor. A certain difficulty arises from the fact that no clear distinction is made between PNP and NPN. Thus figures 2· 15 to 2·29 all refer to PNP while 2·30 and 2.31 is for NPN. Biassing is then discussed together with the techniques for temperature compensation. The low-frequency equivalent circuit is developed in chapter 4, followed in chapter 5 by low-frequency amplifiers. Power amplifiers, together with heat sink design, are then considered, followed by high-frequency amplifiers. A chapter on feedback completes the material related to amplification. Chapter 9 deals with switching including multivibrators, shift-registers and logic gates. The theme now moves from circuit applications to describe some further semiconductor devices; these include the unijunction transistor field-effect transistor, the thyristor and the tunnel diode. The treatment of the thyristor is perhaps over simplified and, in view of its importance in power engineering, this device certainly deserves more space. Power-supply regulators (stabilizers), oscillators and modulation complete the text.