Nonlinear Transport

Abstract

The year 1951 marked an important milestone in the physics of semiconductors. The invention of the transistor by J. Bardeen, W. Shockley, and W. Brattain opened the era of solid-state electronics: through the successive steps of integrated circuits, large-scale integration (LSI), very large-scale integration (VLSI), and finally microprocessors, one of the most impressive and unpredictable technological revolutions of human history was realized. At present, systems are fabricated in single chips that contain almost a billion transistors, and computers can perform almost a billion elementary instructions per second.