Lessons from Nanoelectronics : A New Perspective on Transport

Everyone is familiar with the amazing performance of a modern smart phone, powered by a billion-plus nanotransistors, each having an active region that is barely a few hundred atoms in length. These lecture notes are about a less-appreciated by-product of the microelectronics revolution, namely the deeper understanding of current flow, and device operation that it has enabled, which forms the basis for a new approach to transport problems. The book assumes very little background beyond linear algebra and differential equations, and is intended to be accessible to anyone in any branch of science or engineering.

Everyone is familiar with the amazing performance of a modern laptop, powered by more than a billion nanotransistors, each having an active region that is barely a few hundred atoms long.

These lectures, however, are about a less-appreciated by-product of the microelectronics revolution, namely the deeper understanding of current flow, energy exchange and device operation that it has enabled, which forms the basis for what we call the bottom-up approach.

The book assumes very little background beyond linear algebra and differential equations, and is intended to be accessible to anyone in any branch of science or engineering.

These lectures represent our attempt to make these lessons broadly accessible to those who are not experts in device physics or transport theory, and would like to keep it that way. At the same time, we hope the experts too will enjoy taking a fresh new look at their favorite subject, emphasizing fundamental insights of general validity.