I recently came across the PDFs of Bob Wildar’s Introduction to Semiconductor Devices in the Computer History Museum’s digital archive. I haven’t read them yet, but from glancing through chapters 1 and 2 I’m really excited. I’ve been looking for a text that explains how transistors work, not just how to use a model to predict their behavior. While having a model is important for designing circuits, I really want to have an intuitive understanding of what happens inside of a transistor that allows it to act as an amplifier. I love “The Art of Electronics”, and while it tells you pretty much everything you need to use a transistor, it doesn’t really get into what is happening inside of a transistor (other than the famous transistor man).
This blog post gives some background that mentions Wildar preparing these documents for the Air Force while he was working as an instructor: http://analogfootsteps.blogspot.com/2014/07/widlars-us-air-force-performance-review.html?view=flipcard
I love the practical tone he writes with and the beautiful hand drawn diagrams.
This is the link to the archive on the Computer History Museum where I took these PDFs from: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2014/05/
Here are a few more diagrams I really liked:
