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January 2025

Understanding Energy Bands in Semiconductors
Valence and conduction bands, forbidden and Fermi energies, density of states, Fermi-Dirac statistics.
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Vikram Sekar
1
The Joy of Semiconductor Devices
A first principles based, continuously evolving, beginners guide to solid state physics and transistor devices.
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Vikram Sekar
1
January 2025: Margin Notes on Optics
Broken undersea cables, imaging electrons with attosecond pulses, affordable lidar for automotive, peacock-inspired semiconductor lasers that cut steel…
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Vikram Sekar
How Dennard Scaling Allowed Transistors to Shrink
A detailed explanation of Robert Dennard's exact rules to scale a MOS-transistor's dimensions that resulted in more transistors on a single chip without…
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Vikram Sekar
5
Ruthenium: The Next Step in Interconnects for Advanced Logic Nodes?
Why ruthenium is emerging as an alternative to copper for low-level metal interconnects as pitch drops below 20-nm in sub 2-nm class advanced technology…
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Vikram Sekar
Introducing paid subscription plans
🌱 This newsletter is growing, and your support will go a long way. Promotional pricing for early supporters. 🌱
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Vikram Sekar

December 2024

2024: The Year in Review
Most read articles, interesting posts and a reflection of how this publication began and where it is going.
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Vikram Sekar
2
Holiday Reading Guide, Annual Survey
Your feedback is much appreciated; Curious bits and bobs that inspired, entertained, informed or amused me in 2024.
2
Understanding How Electric Vehicles Convert Battery Power Into Propulsion
How IGBT and SiC based traction inverters use power from the lithium ion battery pack to drive the motors using sinusoidal pulse width modulation.
4
Why We Can't Build Lasers on Silicon
Silicon's Achilles Heel is that its indirect bandgap prevents the implementation of high performance integrated lasers which are much desired in…
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Vikram Sekar
3
Starlink D2C, Tower Si-Pho, LLMs for Chip Design, Ionosphere Maps with Cellphones, Symmetry in IC Design
FCC gives Starlink a green light; 300 mm silicon photonics from Tower; AI driven chip design; using cellphones as earth sensors; tools to ensure…
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Vikram Sekar
5
© 2025 Vikram Sekar
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