Reddit mentions: The best microelectronics books

There are two main parts of "everything else": Mechanical, and Electronic.

For most hobby-level robotics, the mechanical side of things is pretty simple. Learn about torque and power, and how to change them around (gears, pulleys, levers, etc.) and you're most of the way there. As long as your robot is small and moves reasonably slowly, it doesn't get much harder than that. I can't really offer a good book that covers this because my major is Mechanical Engineering and so my knowledge comes from a wide variety of textbooks and lectures.

The electronic side is much more involved. The best thing that you can do is learn how to solve systems of equations. Learn Ohm's law. Learn Kirchhoff's current and voltage laws. Learn how to do loop current analysis.... The most important thing for a beginner in electronics is to realize that circuit schematics are not flow charts. Current does not flow down one wire and then another. Everything is moving all the time. I strongly recommend Practical Electronics Handbook by Sinclair and Dunton.

Once you get into the more advanced robots, when you have a real budget and you're doing more complex things, believe it or not, the electronic side gets to be the easy part. The faster your robot moves and the more complicated moves it can make, the more advanced your mechanical analysis needs to be. College-level textbooks on kinematics, statics, and dynamics are your best bet. And just like the mechanics, the programming gets complicated much faster than the electronics. If you want to make a robot that can drive or fly around quickly, you get pretty deep into nonlinear control theory. Same for robot arms and motion planning.

Oh, as far as recommendations for actual robot products go, check out sparkfun and adafruit and see if any kits really catch your attention. Otherwise, Mindstorms products make the mechanical and electronic assembly of the robot much easier - you don't have to worry about the electronics at all, and the mechanics are just lego technic. That said, you won't learn any electronic theory from playing with Mindstorms, so it's a bit of a compromise.

It probably only matters a lot if you want to go into semiconductors or some allied field that uses similar technology (e.g. disk drive heads, and in the future nanoelectronics). Do some research about this field to help decide what your interest level is. Here's some links:

Solid State Technology - Trade Magazine

[List of (Chemical/Physical Manufacturing) Processes used in Semiconductor Fabrication](
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#List_of_steps)

Look for this one in your engineering school library:

Electronics Materials Processes Handbook

Chip Manufacturing Process - Philips Factory - pretty recent version

Old-timey Chip Manufacturing - Fairchild - 1967 vintage - good for seeing a much simplified version of manufacturing. Keep in mind that Intel was founded by engineers who left Fairchild the year after this video was made. How things have changed! Fairchild invented the core technology used since 1960 called "planar technology". Only very recently has this basic technology started to run out of steam (and one of the replacements is the so-called finFET or trigate transistor design).

Chip Manufacturing at TSMC - the largest "foundry" manufacturing company. This video is a little more technical than the others.

I don't think the class mentioned is likely to be particular difficult material but I'm an EE; I specialized in IC design and semiconductor physics/modeling - one advantage is I understand the electrical side of why and what it's for.

In terms of course load it's iffy if you should overload that far. In the US kids do that because of the uncertainty of funding for tuition but in countries where you have more support, it probably is wise to underload a bit. It's a good idea in the US too but it's a harder sell.

There's no place in a resume/CV for recording how you had a heroically overloaded schedule (and no one cares who might hire you). They will care if you manage to burn-out or fail-out, affecting your grades or graduation however.

BTW we talk about some of this whole subject in /r/chipdesign I'm usually the one posting the (ChemE or EE related) manufacturing process links.

I am a current EE student right now and saw you ask in another comment about book recommendations so I thought I would throw a few in:

• a frequently recommended electronics book is :Art of Electronics
  
• A frequently used (us included) electronics book is Microelectronic Circuits
  
  
• For introductory circuits we use (and i enjoy) : Fundamentals of electric circuits
  
  
• I am hoping to get through : Signal Processing and Linear Systems
  
  
• instead of the above the smartest professor I know recommends anything by : Oppenheim
  
  
• a couple good books for brushing up/learning engineering mathematics: Engineering Mathmatics and Advanced Engineering Mathmatics
  
  
  You should probably throw in some electromagnetic and semiconductor physics for good measure as well.

Here is a link to a pretty thorough course in beginning analog circuits. I don't know how much you would get out of it seeing as you would probably know most of it from being a physicist, but it's there for reference. The next step up would be this book by Sedra and Smith. It will start off with Thevenin and Norton equivalents and work up from there. The book is very large and contains damn near everything you need to know about analog circuits (even has a chapter on semi-conductor physics :)). If you have any interest in digital circuit logic you can go here. Also, I think I see an Arduino in the article picture. There is plenty of documentation on their website. If you want to know more about microprocessors in general, Amazon has a long list of books that could probably suit your needs. Hope that helps! :)

You have to learn the concepts of digital signal processing. There are alot of really good books out there on amazon. You can choose to implement these algorithms in many ways, in C++ using various audio libraries, in CUDA/OCL on a GPU or even in hardware level via Verilog/VHDL on an FPGA.

If you want to deal with raw circuitry, you need to learn analog signal processing, you might have to learn the concept of analog electronics. BJT's/OpAmplifiers/ClassA/AB/D etc. I recommend this book, it is fantastic.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195323033/

I recommend reading up the concepts of DSP first. Discrete Fourier Transforms, frequency manipulation such as low/high/band pass filtering. All the various concepts basically. This coursera site shows most important concepts.
https://www.coursera.org/course/dsp

Also, unless you are working on an FPGA, there is not much point testing/starting out on an embedded system. Try it out on your PC/Mac first

These are super routine terms in semiconductor fabs. You should learn the process steps to manufacturing semiconductors so these terms are clear. Start with that now; one needs to be "buzzword compliant" in a general sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication

There are textbooks covering this in more detail. Gory yet still somewhat summary details can be found in Fundamentals of Microfabrication and Nanotechnology - Volume 1. Beyond that it's specialized textbooks, IEEE papers and talking with IEEE paper authors directly.

When I took that class we used the same book, which I found to be one of the better ones I've used.

A lot of people seem to recommend the Sedra book

This is a "must have". It's not a textbook, but rather a manual put together by a large design company in Germany. Since it doesn't come from a textbook publisher the book is very cheap compared to most books (I think you can find cheap new copies on eBay):

• Trilogy of Magnetics - Würth Elektronik
  
  These are two books that I keep in my bookshelf at work:
  
  
• Digital Design and Computer Architecture - Harris
  
  
• Signal and Power Integrity - Bogatin
  
  Plus these:
  
  
• Designing Analog Chips - Hans Camenzind
  
  
• Microelectronic Circuits - Sedra & Smith
  
  [Edit] Added a book to the list

I can only reference engineering textbooks in Russian, it's probably not what you want. It's a domain-specific knowledge, but you can try something like this book.

Sedra/Smith Microelectronics

You will learn more about electronics than you will ever need to know, in one book :)

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Engineering-Microelectronic-Fabrication/dp/0195136055#

Thats a good book.

When I took my electronics class I completely hated Sedra and Smith during the first half of the semester. As things began to make sense and my time playing at the lab increased I finally understood how awesome the book is.

Sedra and Smith is a great textbook if that is not what you are using already.

What part of Electronics I was the most troublesome? Large signal analysis? Small signal analysis?

i'm guess you mean this RF book.

I used to be a nanosystems engineering major, most nano engineering is geared towards MEMS and MOSFET production (think mechEng at a tiny scale)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0982299109
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Microelectronic-Fabrication-Modular-Devices/dp/0201444941

If it's the Sedra and Smith book I'm thinking about, probably because it's an integrated circuits book, which would be totally inappropriate for a beginner.

[when the hat is phat] (https://www.amazon.ca/Microelectronic-Circuits-Adel-Sedra/dp/0195323033)

I don't know if these are the droids you're looking for, but your description is rather vague.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871708043

http://www.amazon.com/Microelectronic-Processing-Inorganic-Materials-Characterization/dp/0841209340

I always think of a bjt as a diode that blocks in both directions unless a voltage (and since it's a diode a little current must move) is applied to the base. Cutoff means no current flows, so you can remove voltage at the base to prevent current flowing from the collector to the emitter. Breakdown is what happens when you put soooo much voltage into something you literally break it. (Eg put too much voltage across a diode and it will leak current even though it should theoretically stop it)

There is a funny area used for amplification that is really complex where I usually just pull the bjt equations from Sedra/smith's http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195323033?pc_redir=1395092360&robot_redir=1 and treat it like a math problem