Over the past five decades,microelectronics has revolutionized our lives.While beyond the realm of possibility a few decades ago, cellphones, digital cameras, laptop computers, and many other electronic products have now become an integral part of our daily affairs.
Learning microelectronics can be fun. As we learn how each device operates, how devices
comprise circuits that perform interesting and useful functions, and how circuits form sophisticated systems, we begin to see the beauty of microelectronics and appreciate the reasons for its explosive growth.
This chapter gives an overview of microelectronics so as to provide a context for the material
presented in this book.We introduce examples ofmicroelectronic systems and identify important circuit “functions” that they employ. We also provide a review of basic circuit theory to refresh the reader’s memory.