The problems discussed in this little book could perhaps be described more exactly by a title such as "Main approaches to electrical breakdown phenomena in "good" single-crystal semiconductors and devices based on them", where the term "good semiconductors" is understood as referring to "semiconductors with relatively high carrier mobility". Roughly speaking, the phenomena considered in this book apply to semiconductors with a low-field mobility ?, of a magnitude exceeding ~ (10 100) cm ²/Vs. The term "main approaches" means that the breakdown phenomena discussed in this book are considered, as a rule, in the context of fairly simple spatial configurations.

In semiconductors with relatively small values for the low-field mobility ? i.e. in polycrystalline, amorphous, and most polymer semiconductors, etc., thermal breakdown plays a very important role. The most detailed review of phenomena associated with thermal breakdown can be found in Ref. [200], by this book is unfortunately available only in Russian. The fundamentals of thermal breakdown theory are expounded in Refs. [201] [205].

It is very difficult as a rule to separate the contributions of electrical and thermal breakdown in the case of semiconductors of low mobility. The history of breakdown switching in chalcogenide glassy semiconductors research appears to provide one of the most instructive examples of this problem. The question of the breakdown mechanism in this materials was already raised in the pioneer works [206] [208], but the problem still cannot be considered to have been completely solved [209; 210].

The prevention of surface breakdown (the edge...