Book excerpt: The purposes of this book are many. First, we must point out that it is not a device book, as a proper treatment of the range of important devices would require a much larger volume even without treating the important physics for submicron devices. Rather, the book is written principally to pull together and present in a single place, and in a (hopefully) uniform treatment, much of the understanding on relevant physics for submicron devices. Indeed, the understand ing that we are trying to convey through this work has existed in the literature for quite some time, but has not been brought to the full attention of those whose business is the making of submicron devices. It should be remarked that much of the important physics that is discussed here may not be found readily in devices at the 1.0-JLm level, but will be found to be dominant at the O.I-JLm level. The range between these two is rapidly being covered as technology moves from the 256K RAM to the 16M RAM chips.