I just finished up the final exam for IC tech. It went okay. On the one hand, I was able to answer most of the questions in a decent way. On the other hand, I forgot my notes on epitaxy! No!
At the beginning of the semester I thought that this class would eat me. It started with a bang, talking about wave functions and Fermi levels and similar quantum crazy stuff. After a lot of very intense studying I managed to get a basic understanding of the early stuff.
And then the learning curve showed its true nature: you start off by banging into a brick wall with the semiconductor physics, and then it's smooth sailing. Later topics were things like oxidation of silicon, or doping. These are complicated subjects in their own right, but much easier to grasp. And to top it off, there aren't really that many formulas that you'll ever have to use, and they're all in the lecture notes, which you can use on exams.
Overall, I think that I now have a much better understanding of how transistors work, how chips are made, and what the big deal is with integrated circuit layout. Nobody learned more than a fraction of the material -- the professor knew a lot, but the information just came too fast and too disjointed to hold on to all of it -- but it was good stuff. I think we were tested not so much on our retention of the material, but on how good we were at understanding the lecture notes well enough to look up the bit of information that we needed. And that's actually a very clever approach to testing.
Three down, one to go.
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