This book, now in its eighth edition, still has the character of a textbook with the emphasis on "Physics". I have refrained from sacrificing topics such as the Seebeck, Thomson, Peltier and quantum Hall effects although they do not have a large-scale practical application. The various kinds of field effect transistors such as HBT, HEMT, MODFET and the chip technology have not been considered because going into details would necessarily end up with referring the interested reader to commercially available computer programs, i.e. to the Big Business world. What is new compared with the previous edition? In Chap. 1 you will now find a short description of production processes of pure single crystal silicon which is nearly free of lattice defects. In Sect. 4.14 the calculation of current in a sample subject to combined de and high-frequency ac fields is based on quantum mechanics rather than classical physics (called "photon assisted tunneling"). The calculation is applied to charge transport in quantum wires and dots in Chap.14. This chapter includes production methods for quantum dots in their regular arrangement and a dot laser which operates at room temperature. In Chap. 15 there is a new section on doped Fullerenes in view of a field effect transistor based on this material. There are two more appendices: One provides a calculation of the potentials in quantum wells, and the other is a table of 38 semiconductors and semimetals with their characteristic data.
