Links
an incomplete list of links with useful informationGeneral Reference:
- On Being a Scientist, a free book about responsible conduct in research
- A Q&A about Reproducibility and Transparency in research
- Principles of Semiconductor Devices, a free online textbook by B. Van Zeghbroeck
- A Heat Transfer Textbook another free online book by J. Lienhard
- General Chemistry by Petrucci et al. (from LibreTexts)
- Full PDF books on the nanoHUB (S. Datta, M. Lundstrom)
- The Stanford 2D Semiconductor Transistor Benchmarking website
- IRDS, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems
- MIT "Well-Tempered" bulk silicon nMOSFET page (backup page)
- Shigeo Maruyama's nanotube site and David Tomanek's nanotube site
- MOSIS 2.0, a low-volume integrated circuit fabrication service
- NIST/SEMATECH Engineering Statistics Handbook
- Britney Spears' guide to semiconductor physics
- Ernesto Illy on the science of coffee (PDF)
- Library of Green's Functions
Material Properties:
- Properties of silicon, GaN, and other semiconductors from the Ioffe Institute
- Universal physical constants from NIST (and plain-text list)
- Kaye & Laby Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants
- Handbook of Carbon, Graphite, Diamond and Fullerenes (Pierson, 1993)
- An interactive periodic table and another periodic table with very detailed elemental data
- Touloukian's Thermophysical Properties of Matter (1970), courtesy of DTIC
- Vol 1, Thermal Conductivity of Metallic Elements & Alloys (58 Mb)
- Vol 2, Thermal Conductivity of Nonmetallic Solids (87 Mb)
- Vol 4, Specific Heat of Metallic Elements & Alloys (53 Mb)
- Vol 5, Specific Heat of Nonmetallic Solids (87 Mb)
- Ho, Powell, Liley, Thermal Conductivity of the Elements, J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data 1, 279-421 (1972)
- Powell, Ho, Liley, Thermal Conductivity of Selected Materials, Part 1, NSRDS (1966)
- Ho, Powell, Liley, Thermal Conductivity of Selected Materials, Part 2, NSRDS (1968)
Research, Writing, Figures, and Presentations:
- Eric's thoughts on good thesis talks, paper-writing timelines, formatting a research CV, faculty job apps, faculty job interviews, assistant prof salaries, how tenure works, being a professor, costs of a research lab, writing rec letters, teaching evaluations, grade distributions, professors moving, homeworks in the age of AI, research in computer modeling, conference registration, figure fonts and proportions, mobility and thermal conductivity units, preparing for a PhD program, choosing a PhD program, grades in PhD programs, picking research problems, picking team members, students skipping class, seminar attendance, citations and h-index, transistor mobility, CV of rejections, and more
- Prof. Serious (Substack) On Choosing an Academic Career
- Rob Candler's paper on Stuff Most Students Never Ask about Grad School (IEEE)
- "So Long, and Thanks for the PhD!", everything you wanted to know about grad school but were afraid to ask
- Grad school, writing, and publishing advice from Jack Baker (Stanford CEE)
- Stephen Secules on How to Be a Grad Student and Christos Kozyrakis on How to Be a Bad Grad Student
- Related advice on "How to have a bad career in research/academia" by David Patterson
- Advice for new grad students, women in engineering, and more from Jennifer Rexford
- How to Succeed in Grad School Part 1 and Part 2 by Marie desJardins
- How hard should science trainees work?
- PLoS Ten Simple Rules Collection (short PDF) including Hamming on research (based on this long version)
- Ten simple rules for getting published, making presentations, making posters, getting grants, etc.
- How to choose a good scientific problem (U. Alon) and how to pick good problems (S. Senturia)
- David Goodstein's Chapter 3 on How Science Works from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence
- Prashant Kamat's website on research, publishing, and graphics
- Nicholas Carlini on how to do important research (and win a best-paper award)
- No-nonsense Podzorov group advice ("to be successful in [..] research, you cannot be sloppy")
- Style manuals from AIP, APS, IEEE, and Nature
- NIST checklist for SI units and additional recommendations on style
- Nature's one-page guide to writing an abstract, publish like a pro, and write a first-class paper
- ACS virtual issue on the Art of Scientific Publication, Part 1 and Part 2
- Advice on writing good papers from P. Kamat, S. Senturia, G. Whitesides, and D. Weitz
- More scientific writing advice, a guide from SciDev and another from Nature Physics
- How to love writing a paper, tell a story, and avoid hype -- plus a blog on writing (science)
- An open letter to grad students and other procrastinators: it's time to write
- Nature guide to journal article peer review and several more articles about it
- Advice for making figures (M. Rolandi), ten rules for better figures, and ten tips for captions
- Improving Matlab figures, more Matlab figure advice and yet more, plus the PlotPub library
- Making figures, PDFs, and presentations accessible to color blind people
- Rethinking the design of presentation slides
- World's Worst Research Presentation: spoof talk on YouTube
- Mike Morrison's design of scientific posters and more on #betterposters
- Milestones in the history of data visualization
- How to Get an Academic Job from The Chronicle of Higher Education
- HHMI's excellent lab management guide and similar advice from AAAS/Science
- A guide to early-career researchers from Elsevier
- Tomorrow's Professor, a book about preparing for an academic career (R. Reis, 1997)
Software:
- Wolfram's integral calculator
- ViennaSHE, a free semiconductor device simulator from TU Wien
- Programs for extracting data from graphs: Engauge Digitizer, PlotDigitizer, g3data
- Raman peak fitting with Fityk (GUI-based) and Peakfit.m (for Matlab/Octave)
- Online spreading resistance calculators at Univ. Waterloo
- LayoutEditor is a free integrated circuit layout editor
- LAMMPS and VMD, free software for Molecular Dynamics simulations
updated Aug 2026