TABLE OF CONTENTS Following the invention of the transistor by the Bell Labs team John Bardeen, William Schockley and Walter Brattain electronic products and systems have gained much compactness, intelligence, user friendliness, inter-connectability and low power consumption. Half a century of developmental activity in the world of semiconductors has given the modern world several mature and growing technologies with enormous miniaturising power based on Si, gallium arsenide (GaAs) and newer materials such as SiGe. With compactness and power efficiency being key issues in the semiconductor world, other related technologies such as battery chemistries, magnetics, connectors, and packaging of components have also evolved in leaps and bounds. Modern flat panel display technologies have commenced the replacement of the cathode ray tube, which has served the industry for over a century.
Today we are heading towards systems on chip (SoC) concepts, with over 100 million transistor ultra large scale integration (ULSI) technologies entering into production at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While the SoC concepts and implementations providing dense ICs, research labs are always working hard to develop newer transistor structures. Some examples from US industry are the GaAs MOSFET [1] and indium phosphide (InP) high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) with a frequency of 350 GHz [2]. Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have achieved frequencies over 362 GHz for HEMT devices [3]. While CMOS based devices were at the heart of technological advances related to miniaturisation in the 1980s and 1990s, alternatives to CMOS logic devices are being investigated. Some of these...
