Course Description
EEE 3396C Solid-State Electronic Devices is the course that connects semiconductor physics to the devices an electrical engineer actually uses. It takes the material properties established in an electronic materials course — carriers, doping, the Fermi level, drift and diffusion — and builds from them the p-n junction, the bipolar transistor and the MOSFET, deriving their terminal characteristics rather than accepting them as given.
The Statewide Course Numbering System titles the number Solid-State Electronic Devices and describes it concisely as an “introduction to the principles of semiconductor electron device operation,” with a statewide prerequisite of EEE 3304.
⚠⚠ Only one Florida institution carries this exact suffixed number. Florida Polytechnic University offers EEE 3396C at 3 credits under the title Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices. Three other institutions teach the same subject under the unsuffixed number EEE 3396, which is a separate SCNS record:
- University of Florida — Solid State Electronic Devices (3 credits): “introduces the principles of semiconductor electron device operation. Laboratory.” Prerequisite EEL 3008.
- University of West Florida — Solid-State Electronic Devices (3 credits): “introduction to the principles of semiconductor electron device operation.” Prerequisite EEL 3111 and general chemistry.
- Florida International University — Introduction to Solid State Devices (3 credits).
This matters for transfer and it matters for course selection, and the Special Information section sets out what to do about it. The subject is the same across all four institutions; what differs is the suffix, and therefore the SCNS record that a transfer evaluator will match against.
The C suffix on Florida Poly’s version indicates an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course. Notably, UF’s catalog description for the unsuffixed number also ends with the word “Laboratory” — so laboratory work is part of this subject at more than one institution regardless of how the number is suffixed.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Apply semiconductor fundamentals — energy bands, the Fermi level, density of states and carrier statistics — to determine equilibrium carrier concentrations in intrinsic and doped material.
- Analyse carrier transport by drift and diffusion, apply the Einstein relation, and use the continuity equation with generation and recombination to describe non-equilibrium behaviour.
- Derive the electrostatics of the p-n junction in equilibrium: built-in potential, depletion width, and the electric field and potential profiles.
- Derive the ideal diode equation and explain the physical origin of each term; account for departures from ideality including recombination current, high-level injection and series resistance.
- Analyse junction capacitance — depletion and diffusion components — and relate it to switching speed.
- Explain reverse breakdown by avalanche and Zener mechanisms and distinguish them by their temperature coefficients.
- Analyse metal–semiconductor contacts, distinguishing rectifying Schottky behaviour from ohmic contacts, and explain how an ohmic contact is engineered.
- Analyse bipolar junction transistor operation from carrier transport: base transport, injection efficiency, current gain, the Early effect, and the origin of the operating regions.
- Analyse the MOS capacitor through accumulation, depletion and inversion, and derive the threshold voltage including body effect.
- Derive MOSFET current–voltage characteristics in triode and saturation, and explain channel-length modulation, subthreshold conduction and short-channel effects.
- Relate device physics to circuit-level models, explaining where a SPICE model parameter comes from physically.
Optional Outcomes
- Analyse optoelectronic devices — photodiodes, solar cells, LEDs and laser diodes — from carrier generation and recombination.
- Describe heterojunctions and compound-semiconductor devices, and the advantages of wide-bandgap materials (SiC, GaN) in power and RF applications.
- Describe device fabrication steps and relate each to a device parameter.
- Analyse junction field-effect transistors and MESFETs.
- Analyse power devices: the power MOSFET, IGBT and thyristor.
- Perform device characterisation in the laboratory and extract parameters from measured data.
- Use TCAD or numerical simulation to model device behaviour.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Semiconductor fundamentals — crystal structure, energy bands and effective mass, direct and indirect gaps, density of states, Fermi–Dirac statistics, intrinsic and extrinsic carrier concentration, and the temperature dependence of each.
- Carrier transport — drift and mobility, scattering mechanisms, diffusion and the Einstein relation, generation and recombination (direct, Shockley–Read–Hall, Auger), carrier lifetime, and the continuity equation.
- The p-n junction at equilibrium — the depletion approximation, built-in potential, space-charge region width, field and potential distribution, and energy band diagrams under bias.
- The p-n junction under bias — minority carrier injection, the ideal diode equation and its derivation, deviations from ideality, the ideality factor, and temperature dependence.
- Junction capacitance and switching — depletion and diffusion capacitance, reverse recovery, and the speed limits they impose.
- Breakdown — avalanche multiplication and Zener tunnelling, breakdown voltage against doping, and the distinguishing temperature coefficients.
- Metal–semiconductor contacts — the Schottky barrier, thermionic emission, image-force lowering, and ohmic contact formation by heavy doping.
- Bipolar junction transistors — structure and operating regions, minority carrier distributions in the base, base transport factor and emitter injection efficiency, current gain, the Ebers–Moll and Gummel–Poon models, base-width modulation, and frequency limits.
- The MOS capacitor — accumulation, depletion and inversion; surface potential; the C–V characteristic; flat-band voltage, oxide charge and work-function difference; threshold voltage derivation and body effect.
- MOSFET operation — the gradual-channel approximation, triode and saturation regions, transconductance, channel-length modulation, subthreshold slope, and short-channel effects including velocity saturation and drain-induced barrier lowering.
- From physics to circuit models — how a device parameter becomes a SPICE model parameter, and what a circuit designer is implicitly assuming.
Optional Topics
- Optoelectronic devices: photodiodes, avalanche photodiodes, solar cells and their efficiency limits, LEDs and laser diodes.
- Heterojunctions, band-gap engineering, HEMTs and compound semiconductors.
- Wide-bandgap power devices in SiC and GaN.
- JFETs, MESFETs and specialised structures.
- Power devices: power MOSFETs, IGBTs, thyristors.
- Device fabrication and its relationship to device parameters.
- Laboratory characterisation: I–V and C–V measurement, parameter extraction, Hall measurement.
- TCAD device simulation.
Resources & Tools
- Solid State Electronic Devices (Streetman and Banerjee) is the dominant text for this course — it shares the statewide title and is the most common adoption nationally. Semiconductor Physics and Devices (Neamen) is the other standard choice and is often preferred for its worked examples; Physics of Semiconductor Devices (Sze and Ng) is the reference work, beyond undergraduate scope but the place to look for detail.
- Principles of Electronic Materials and Devices (Kasap) bridges from the materials prerequisite and is a useful companion where students found the prior course difficult.
- Simulation — the nanoHUB tools (nanohub.org, free to academic users) include p-n junction, MOS capacitor and MOSFET simulators that make band diagrams and carrier profiles visible under bias; these are unusually good for this specific material. Silvaco Atlas or Synopsys Sentaurus appear where TCAD is taught.
- MATLAB or Python for computing carrier concentrations, plotting band diagrams and depletion profiles, and solving the continuity equation numerically.
- SPICE — used here in reverse from a circuits course: to see how changing a physical model parameter changes terminal behaviour.
- Laboratory instruments (integrated form) — semiconductor parameter analyser or curve tracer, C–V meter, probe station, and temperature-controlled stage where available.
- Reference data — the Ioffe Institute semiconductor parameter database; the IEEE Electron Devices Society and the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices; the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS) for where scaling is heading.
Career Pathways
- Device engineer and semiconductor process engineer (SOC 17-2071, Electrical Engineers) — the direct destination.
- Process integration engineer and yield engineer in semiconductor fabrication.
- Failure analysis engineer and reliability engineer — diagnosing why a device degrades requires exactly this course’s physics.
- TCAD and device modelling engineer — a specialised route that continues from here into device simulation.
- Power electronics engineer working with SiC and GaN, where device physics is directly design-relevant rather than background.
- Photovoltaics and optoelectronics engineer — relevant in Florida given substantial utility-scale solar deployment.
- Graduate study in microelectronics, photonics or nanotechnology — this course is the standard entry requirement, and performance in it is what admissions committees weigh.
- Florida settings include SkyWater Technology’s Kissimmee facility in Osceola County, L3Harris (Palm Bay — custom and radiation-hardened devices), Lockheed Martin (Orlando), onsemi, Jabil (St. Petersburg), Duke Energy and Florida Power & Light for photovoltaic work, and Florida Polytechnic’s own industry partnerships in the Lakeland corridor. ⚠ As with most device work, the largest employers are outside Florida — Arizona, Texas, Oregon, California and New York — and students aiming at this field should plan on a national search.
Special Information
⚠⚠ The suffix problem — four institutions, two SCNS records
This is the most important practical fact about this course. The same subject sits under two different SCNS records:
| Number | Institution | Institutional title | Credits |
|---|
| EEE 3396C | Florida Polytechnic | Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices | 3 |
| EEE 3396 | University of Florida | Solid State Electronic Devices | 3 |
| EEE 3396 | University of West Florida | Solid-State Electronic Devices | 3 |
| EEE 3396 | Florida International University | Introduction to Solid State Devices | 3 |
Consequences to act on:
- SCNS equivalency does not cross the suffix. A course taken as EEE 3396 does not automatically satisfy a requirement written as EEE 3396C, or the reverse — even though the subject is the same and all four institutions carry it at 3 credits.
- A statewide course inventory that lists four institutions against EEE 3396C is misleading, because three of them carry the unsuffixed number. If you are relying on a count of institutions to judge how portable this course is, the honest figure for the suffixed identifier is one.
- Carry the syllabus and request the substitution explicitly. Departments approve these routinely because the content plainly corresponds — but the request has to be made, and it is granted on evidence rather than on the number.
⚠ Do not confuse this with EEE 4396C or EEE 4351
Two nearby numbers cause genuine confusion:
- EEE 4396C at UCF is Introduction to Semiconductor Manufacturing Techniques — a fabrication course (wafer processing, device fabrication, industry tools and measurement), not a device-physics course. Same century digits, different subject.
- EEE 4351 / EEE 4351C also carries the statewide title Solid-State Electronic Devices at FAMU, FSU and USF. The same statewide label therefore sits on two different course numbers at different levels. Read the level digit and the description, not the title.
Prerequisites
The statewide prerequisite is EEE 3304. Institutional requirements differ and are the ones that bind: UF requires EEL 3008; UWF requires EEL 3111 together with general chemistry (CHM 2045, CHM 1045 or CHM 1045C). Check your own catalog.
What the prerequisites stand for is circuit analysis plus enough chemistry and modern physics to reason about atoms and bands. The unnamed requirement, and the one that actually determines how hard the course feels, is comfort with exponentials and with calculus applied to physical distributions — carrier concentrations, the Fermi function and diffusion profiles are all exponential, and the derivations integrate across a depletion region rather than manipulating a circuit equation.
⚠ Chemistry is the deferred requirement that most often blocks students at UWF, where it is named explicitly. Electrical engineering students who postpone chemistry as the least obviously relevant requirement can find it gating this course and, through it, the whole microelectronics sequence. Clear it early.
Position in the curriculum
This course sits at the junction between the physics of the degree and its engineering. It follows circuits and (where offered) an electronic materials course, and it is the prerequisite for the microelectronics electives: at UF, EEE 4222 (resonant MEMS), EEE 4329, EEE 4331 (microelectronic fabrication), EEE 4414 (memory technologies), EEE 4420 (nanodevices) and EEE 4423 (quantum computing) all list EEE 3396 or EEE 3396C as their gate. At FIU it precedes EEE 4421C Introduction to Nanofabrication.
That makes this a high-leverage course: a weak grade here does not merely cost a grade, it closes off the microelectronics elective track for the remainder of the degree.
Credit structure and the C suffix
Florida Poly’s C-suffixed version is an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course at 3 credits — expect roughly five contact hours a week rather than three, which is the usual trap with integrated courses. UF’s unsuffixed version also includes laboratory work according to its catalog description, so the practical difference between the two packagings may be smaller than the suffix suggests. Check the meeting pattern for your section.
Difficulty and time commitment
This is a conceptually demanding course, and its characteristic difficulty is that the derivations are long. The ideal diode equation and the MOSFET I–V relation each take a page or more, and a student who has memorised the endpoints without following the argument cannot adapt them — which is exactly what examination questions ask for. Plan on nine to eleven hours a week, and work the derivations by hand at least twice.
Drawing energy band diagrams under bias is the single highest-value skill in the course. Most examination questions can be answered from a correct band diagram, and most wrong answers begin with an incorrect one.
Articulation and transfer
SCNS records this course as guaranteed to transfer to an institution offering the same course. As set out above, only Florida Polytechnic offers this exact number, so read that guarantee narrowly and retain documentation. The course is upper-division and carries no general-education or Gordon Rule designation.
FE exam relevance
The NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering (Electrical and Computer) exam covers semiconductor materials and devices within its Electronics topic area: band gaps, doping, carrier transport, p-n junction behaviour and transistor operation. This course covers that material considerably more deeply than the exam requires. The FE tests recall and application rather than derivation, so a targeted review of the summary relationships is still worth doing.
AI Integration
Device physics is an area where AI assistance is useful for explanation and unreliable for values, and the distinction is unusually clean.
Where it helps. Explaining why the depletion region widens under reverse bias, or what inversion physically means, in different words from the textbook — genuinely valuable when a single explanation has not landed. Also: walking through the algebra of a long derivation, generating plotting scripts for band diagrams and carrier profiles, and explaining the physical meaning of an unfamiliar SPICE model parameter.
⚠ Where it fails, and why the failure is precisely this course’s subject. The characteristic error is that a model supplies a device parameter without its conditions — a mobility, a threshold voltage, a saturation current — when the entire content of this course is that these quantities are functions, not constants. Mobility depends on doping, temperature and field. Threshold voltage depends on oxide thickness, substrate doping, and body bias. Saturation current depends exponentially on temperature. A confident number with no conditions attached is the exact misconception the course exists to dismantle.
A second, more damaging failure: models reliably apply the long-channel square-law MOSFET model to short-channel devices, producing current predictions that are wrong by large factors. This is not a subtle error — it is the central lesson of the modern part of the course, and a generated answer will sail past it because the square law is what dominates the training text.
Models also produce energy band diagrams that are qualitatively wrong — bending the wrong way under bias, or misplacing the Fermi level in a doped region. Because a band diagram is the reasoning tool of the whole subject, an incorrect one propagates into every conclusion drawn from it.
The engineer’s responsibility. A device parameter used in a design is a claim about behaviour under stated conditions of temperature, bias and process. The habit worth forming here is to ask of every value: at what temperature, at what doping, at what bias, and from what measurement? A parameter database or a foundry model card answers those questions; a generated number generally does not. Draw the band diagram yourself — it is the cheapest and most reliable check available in this subject.
Academic integrity. Florida Polytechnic, UF, UWF and FIU all maintain academic integrity policies covering AI-generated work, and practice varies by instructor. Derivations are normally expected to be your own even where computational assistance is permitted, and in the integrated form generated laboratory data is data fabrication, treated more seriously than plagiarism. Ask before you use a tool, and disclose its use where required.