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07/29/2005 -
Electronic Materials Science (2005)
by Eugene A. Irene
ISBN 0-471-69597-1. Wiley Interscience, Hoboken, New Jersey. 2005. Hardcover. 306 pages. $99.95.
| REVIEWED BY: | Srivatsan Sathyamurthy,University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Materials science is an inherently interdisciplinary field that encompasses a wide range of areas of study including physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, along with a range of engineering areas, and there is potential benefit to a textbook on this subject written by someone with a background that is not contemporary materials science. This could provide a new perspective into various fundamental concepts in this field. In this era of ultra-large-scale integration in microelectronics, new challenges are emerging for the development of materials and processes for integrated circuits with nanoscale components. Also, new electronic materials are being developed to meet the ever-increasing demands in a growing range of application areas such as spintronics and fuel cells. An in-depth understanding of a variety of scientific principles and materials fabrication techniques is a must for students entering this field of study. Therefore, with the current state of technology in microelectronics, a textbook on electronic materials science could be very relevant to a university materials science and engineering curriculum.
Electronic Materials Science by Eugene A. Irene represents a chemist's outlook of materials science. Like any good introductory text, this book attempts to cover a wide variety of topics associated with fundamental materials science. For example, it offers in-depth discussions on crystal structure (Chapter 2) and x-ray diffraction (Chapter 3). A clear understanding of these concepts is a must for everyone involved with materials science. Some insight into structure-property correlations is also provided in these chapters.
The book offers several well-treated topics of discussion. Chapter 4 includes a good discussion on point defects, which provides a clear thermodynamic basis for understanding. Similarly, Chapter 5 offers an excellent discussion on diffusion. The Fick's laws are treated in a very efficient fashion. While point defects are discussed with good clarity, the discussions on other forms of defects, such as line defects and grain boundaries fall far short of expectations. These topics are merely mentioned with less than a cursory discussion. Among the low points in the book are the discussions in Chapters 7 and 8. These chapters lack clarity and purpose for what the book sets out to do, which is introduce concepts related to electronic materials science. These chapters seem to be included simply for the sake of inclusion. They don't seem to tie in with the rest of the book.
In the last three chapters, the book finally gets into topics related to electronic materials and devices. But the discussions provided here barely scratch the surface. The book might have better served as a text for electronic materials science if greater focus and depth had been given to these chapters.
Overall, while the book is written well with good quality figures for the most part, it is filled with too many typographical errors and some poorly done sketches (for example, a cubic crystal lattice illustrated in Chapter 2 is not exactly cubic). These errors are very distracting and reduce the usefulness of the book as a primary text for students. In summary, this text may be useful as a supplementary reading for selected topics and will surely need an instructor to guide the students past the many errors in the book.
For more on this book, visit the Wiley web site. |
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