Basic digital device technologies

Abstract

These lectures were first presented at the Atlas Computing Laboratory during winter '78–'79. They are not aimed at electronic specialists, and are about the exploitation of the “middle” of Mendeleyev's “Periodic table of the elements” and the phenomenal growth in semiconductor engineering that is still continuing in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. I present in simple, qualitative terms a basis for the behaviour of semiconductors omitting the physical subtleties, the behaviour of the basic devices - transistors - in their two main configurations - “unipolar” and “bipolar” - the inescapable parasitic and stray effects that accompany realisations of these elements and the way these result in identifiable characteristics for the “Families” of electronic sybsystems in use today — DTL, TTL, ECL, I 2L, MOS, SOS, etc. I include an outline of the processes used to fabricate the most common of today's devices — the silicon-gate N-channel MOS transistor. The lectures serve as an explanatory background for users of the many small-, medium- and large-scale integrated circuits obtainable today and give a basis for choosing a particular technology for a particular project.