BOOK Solid-State
Electronics Pergamon Press 1965. p. 615. Printed in Great Britain
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Vol. 8,
envisage making use of semiconductor devices will wish to supplement this chapter with a reading of a more detailed treatment of circuit design. The final chapter is entitled “Miscellaneous semiconductor devices” and includes a brief description of the properties of tunnel diodes, controlled rectifiers and field-effect transistors. Each chapter has several associated numerical problems, but only a brief bibliography is supplied. The book is well printed, apparently free from typographical errors and at 18s. it represents excellent value for money. It deserves a place on many bookshelves.
M. J. MORANT, Introduction to Semiconductor Devices, Harrap, London, 1964, pp. 126. 18s. THIS is a very useful little book that would be of interest to not only students of electrical engineering and physics but also those professional workers who were brought up on thermionic valves and who now find themselves using semiconductor devices with little more than a pictorial knowledge of the basic physical processes involved. The author concentrates, in four of the six chapters, on the physics of semiconductor materials and semiconductor devices and in so doing establishes clearly that the monograph is aimed primarily at those readers who are looking for a satisfactory explanation of the microphysical processes involved in the operation of semiconductor devices without having to delve into textbooks on pure semiconductor physics, but who seek a more closely argued account than is available in the introductory chapters of most “applications” books. This account is lucid and eminently readable and although the mathematics used will be well within the grasp of most readers, the treatment is sufficiently rigorous to give the reader easy confidence in the relationships derived. Semiconductor materials have so much greater diversity of application than thermionic emission ever did that a knowledge of the fundamental processes involved and an ability to make quantitative comparisons between device materials is important for any worker who hopes to understand new devices, or who is called upon to evaluate the potentialities of, say, the tunnel diode in a particular application. It is in this area of activity that the first four chapters of this monograph will prove their worth. Chapter 5 discusses the transistor as a circuit element and the four terminal network h parameters are derived in terms of a low-frequency equivalent circuit. The chapter continues with a brief discussion of high-frequency effects, a short description of the construction of three types of transistor and a few notes on the use of the transistor as a switch. Many of those readers who
R. N. THOMAS Bedford College, London, N. W.1
615
Solid-State Electronics pp. 615-616. J.
Pergamon Press 1965. Vol. 8, Printed in Great Britain
J. DOWNING, Modulation Systems Prentice-Hall, 1964. pp. 214, 66s.
and
Noise,
IT IS the purpose of this book to present a unified approach to the analysis of established forms of communication system, using statistical methods and the now well known mathematical representations for random noise. The first section of the text forms a very concise but valuable outline of probability theory, spectral analysis and correlation theory, and the mathematical representation of narrow-band Gaussian noise. Readers who have some knowledge of the above topics will appreciate the clear manner in which they are presented and will also find the section most useful for reference purposes. Other readers will probably need to refer to some of the sources mentioned in the text for a full treatment of certain topics. The next section deals with the effects of noise on the performance of amplitude modulation and angle (phase or frequency) modulation com-
616
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munication systems. The most important forms of amplitude modulation are considered and compared in some detail and in this analysis an arbitrary message form is assumed. This is particularly valuable since such comparisons are frequently based on an assumed sinusoisal message form and this leads to optimistic results in certain circumstances. In dealing with angle modulation systems the fundamental similarity of phase and frequency modulation is demonstrated and attention is then focused on to the analysis of noise effects in a frequency modulation system. Threshold and interference effects in frequency modulation reception are clearly discussed in a qualitative fashion. The results of the analysis of the basic amplitude modulation and frequency modulation systems are used in the following section to demonstrate how the parameters of frequency multiplex systems are chosen to give equal performance in all channels. Time division multiplex systems are introduced at this point. The treatment of aliasing and the prescription for the optimum interpolation filter to reconstruct a sampled waveform is very well presented, and this is followed by an equally good analysis of noise effects in pulse amplitude and pulse duration modulation systems. The use of pulse code modulation is then introduced and the virtues of this form of modulation in cascaded communication systems are demonstrated. The topic of pulse code modulation leads naturally to a treatment of Coherent Binary Signalling. The matched filter concept and its equivalence to correlation detection is dealt with and this is followed by a detailed analysis of the error probabilities that can be achieved in certain binary systems. The final chapter of this book gives a rather brief account of the theory of optimum filtering and the alternative approach of statistical decision theory. The aim of this discussion is to give the reader an introduction to the area of communication theory which is currently of great interest. In retrospect this book contains a remarkable amount of very well presented material and the author is to be congratulated on his success in restricting the length of the text to a mere two hundred pages while maintaining a very high
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standard readability.
of
mathematical
completeness
an d
D. C. COOPER The University of Birmingham, Dept. of Electronic and Hectrical Engitleeritq Birmingham, 15
Solid-State Electronics pp. 616-617. J. WI. ZIMAN: Cambridge 45s.
Pcrgamon PI-~-S 1965. Printed in Great Britain
Vol.
X,
Principles of the Theory of Solids, University Press, 1961; XI II + 360 pp.
THIS is the kind of book for which many solidstate physicists have been hopefully waiting: a book that presents, as clearly and as simply as possible, the fundamental concepts of the theory of the physics of perfect crystals. The author states that it has been his aim to provide an exposition of the principles, not a decription of the phenomena, in each case giving a self-contained mathematical treatment of the simplest model that will demonstrate each principle. The reader is expected to be acquainted with the main descriptive facts, for instance the free-electron theory of metals, and with “the elements” of quantum mechanis. These “elements” include to-day items such as the theory of scattering, and creation and annihilation operators. Chapter 1 deals with periodic structures, that is Bloch’s theorem, Brillouin zones, etc. Chapters 2 and 3 deal respectively, and almost in parallel, with lattice waves and with electron states. Besides what one would expect to find, more special items are included, such as lattice sums and details of many methods of band structure calculation. A Chapter on “Static Properties” deals sketchily with a variety of topics, while the next one deals in much more detail with elcctronelectron interactions, that is screening, dielectric constant, plasma oscillations. Under “&mdrniCS of Electrons” we find that the equations of motion are discussed first in the Wannier representation, and then by the usual quasi-classical treatment; the rest of this chapter leads to a study of the electronphonon interaction. Transport properties are treated next, by concentrating the essentials of the