TABLE OF CONTENTS This introduction to solid-state principles approaches the topic a bit differently than do traditional texts. Most modern industrial equipment has very few solid-state devices other than large-scale integrated circuits. There are occasional operational amplifiers, transistors, and, in some equipment, discrete power-handling devices such as silicon-controlled rectifiers. With this in mind, rather than devote pages to the manufacture and design of a bipolar transistor, this chapter focuses on solid-state behavior and operation in circuitry. A large variety of solid-state electronic devices are in use today. The following discrete (not integrated) devices are discussed in this chapter:
Bipolar devices:
NPN
PNP
Unipolar devices:
Junction field-effect transistors (JFETs)
Insulated gate field-effect transistors (IGFETs)
Other solid-state devices, their operation, and their applications are discussed in the following three chapters, 15, 16, and 17.
Any discussion of modern semiconductor operation must begin with the operation of a single junction: the PN junction. A PN junction starts out as a crystal of extremely pure semiconductor material. It is so pure that it is actually an insulator. It has no carriers for current flow, which means that its constituent atoms are in a lower energy state, and thus require larger amounts of energy to allow energy transfer (called current flow) than does less-pure material. The PN's semiconductor material is a "monolithic" crystal structure, meaning that the atoms have arranged themselves in a geometric pattern (inasmuch as we can't see atoms, we mathematically model them in a crystalline structure). To do this, they must enter...
