A Freshman Class in Solid-State Devices and Integrated Circuits

Cal Tech offers a two-term class in solid-state devices and integrated circuits to about 100 students each year. In the Fall, the students attend 20 lectures that cover both the background material incuits, solid-state physics and electric fields, and a detailed description of diodes, MOS transistors, and inverters. In addition, there are two laboratory exercises in which the students make a light-emitting diode and a Schottky diode. In the Winter term, the students attend a laboratory, where they make and test a series of devices, one after another, including an MOS capacitor, a p-n diode, an MOS transistor, and an MOS inverter. The students design and lay out these circuits on a personal computer, generate the artwork on a dot-matrix printer, and photograph the artwork onto a glass plate that is used to make the integrated circuits. Each student makes each device, and each does every step of the procedure himself.