Lessons from Nanoelectronics A New Perspective on Transport

Everyone is familiar with the amazing performance of a modern laptop, powered by more than a billion nanotransistors, each having an active region that is barely a few hundred atoms long. These lectures, however, are about a less-appreciated by-product of the microelectronics revolution, namely the deeper understanding of current flow, energy exchange and device operation that it has enabled, which forms the basis for what we call the bottom-up approach. The book assumes very little background beyond linear algebra and differential equations, and is intended to be accessible to anyone in any branch of science or engineering. These lectures represent our attempt to reach those who are not experts in device physics or transport theory and would like to keep it that way. For dedicated graduate students and the experts, I have written extensively in the past. But they too may enjoy these notes taking a fresh look at a familiar subject, emphasizing the insights from mesoscopic physics and nanoelectronics that are of general interest and relevance.