Electronics from the Bottom Up: an educational initiative on 21st century electronics
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Abstract
In the 1960’s, a group of leaders from industry and academia,
recognized that the age of vacuum tubes was ending and that engineers
would have to be educated differently if they were to realize the
opportunities that the new field of microelectronics presented. The
Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee eventually produced
seven undergraduate textbooks and four films and reshaped the
teaching of electronics. Today, MOSFET channel lengths have shrunk
by a factor of 100 and microelectronics has become nanoelectronics,
but we still teach students very much as they were taught 30 years
ago. Research on molecular-scale electronics is giving us a new
understanding of nanoscale devices, but this new knowledge is largely
absent from the semiconductor engineering curriculum. A plethora of
new electronic device technologies are being explored, and, in many
cases, they are not well-described by the conventional tools of the
trade. We believe that the time has come to introduce a new approach
to understanding electronic devices. The “Electronics from the Bottom
Up” series will produce a set of educational modules that introduce a
new, and very general, way of understanding small electronic
devices. This presentation discusses the rationale for this
initiative and outlines our plans.
For a complete list of resources related to this project please see: Electronics from the Bottom Up.
For a complete list of resources related to this project please see: Electronics from the Bottom Up.
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