Course

Unit 1

Introduction to semiconductors and properties

Review of semiconductors, low dimensional semiconductors and materials, transport in nanostructures, Electron flow in solids, diffusive and ballistic electron transport, Coulomb blockade, hall-effect and quantum hall-effect, optical and electro-optic processes in heterostructures.

Unit 2

Semiconductor devices 

Nanoelectronic devices: heterojunction bipolar transistor, hot electron transistors, single electron transistors, resonant tunnelling transistors, low dimensional semiconductor lasers: quantum-well lasers, quantum dot lasers, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, low dimensional photodetectors and modulators

Unit 3

Advanced materials for nanoelectronics and optoelectronics

2D materials (Graphene QDs, TMDs, MXenes… etc.) electronic, photonics and optoelectronics applications.

Unit 4

Spintronics and devices

Spintronics: GMR, TMR, spin injection and detection, magnetic tunnel junctions, dilute magnetic semiconductors and spintronic devices.

Unit 5

Industry relevance analysis

Industrial relevant failure analysis, metrology and device characterizations.

Pre-requisites: Basic maths, physics and chemistry

Total number of classes: 45

Course Outcomes:

• Familiarity with fundamental concepts related to material science of semiconductors.
• Get introduced crystal structures relation with fundamental aspects of atomic bonds and energy bands.
• Bulk semiconductors and their significance along with size effects and applications.
• Understand the influence of size effects on charge transport characteristics under various circumstances.
• Will be able to identify and choose suitable semiconductor nanostructures for different applications as required.
• Estimate the various physical parameters that are related to semiconductor nanostructures for example charge carrier mobility, conductivity and sheet resistance.
• Get introduced to emerging atomically thin nano-semiconductors such as 2D layered functional materials from current research literature.
• Understand the basics of spintronics and spintronic devices

1. Nanotechnology for Microelectronics and Optoelectronics by Raúl José Martín-Palma, José Martínez-Duart, Fernando Agullo-Rueda, Elsevier (2006).
2. Spintronics: Fundamentals and Applications by Igor Zutic, J. Fabian, and S. Das Sarma, Rev. Mod. Phys. 76, 323 (2004).