[.ca] CMOS Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation, Second Edition (ISBN 047170055X)

Excellent:
This is perhaps my favourite textbook throughout my undergrad career next to stewart's calculus. Although we only used half of the chapters in the senior level microelectronics course I was taking I found those chapters to be very insightful. The amazing thing is that a complete solutions manual is provided on the author's website as well as links to free layout and simulation software (lasi 7 and winspice) that are used in the book. I had a question regarding the book and emailed the author on a sunday, to my surprise I got a reply the same day along with a PDF sketch the author drew to describe the concept better to me. This was very consistent with my view of the author as someone who is interested in teaching material to students rather than just showing what he knows. Which means this book lends itself very well to self study. My professor and TAs commented that the physics used in the book is "not that good", but then again this is not a physics textbook. The text contains 29 chapters, and you can view a list of these chapters as well as solutions to problems from these chapters on the text's website: www.cmosedu.com

an ONLY practical IC design book I have seen.:
If you want to design a circuit which can really work, this is the ONLY book which can help you.

Very good reference book on CMOS circuit design:
This book presents a good overview of CMOS circuits from fundamentals to current design techniques. This book is perfect for a senior-level or graduate-level course as well as for the practicing engineer who wants to come up-to-date quickly with current CMOS circuit design techniques. Some areas where the book could be improved include layout issues, but this does not diminish in any way its usefulness.

Surprisingly Shallow:
Like any book that tries to cover "everything" it ends up superficial. I have worked in analog design for close to 8 years and I tought at a top analog school in california. I find this book a disappointment. It tries to cover digital CMOS but it fails because it doesn't go into neither high speed implementation artifacts nor state of the art low speed architectures (Use Rabaey or Neil Weste if you're serious about digital CMOS). As for analog design, the book wastes a jungle-worth of paper on layers and layout rules but never goes into the real problems in layout. If you truly want to know about layout, go to the unparalleled reference by Alan Hasting. As for Analog circuit design, the coverage is very shallow and is not useful at all. No real implementation problems and no state of the art coverage. The best analog circuit design books in my opinion are (in order of prefernece) 1: Jones and Martin 2: Gray and Meyer (mostly BJT though) 3: Razavi's Analog circuit design book. Use any of these books if you're serious about circuits. As for Baker's book, I wouldn't recommend it for the serious and I wouldn't pick it for a class I teach. I'm truly surprised that IEEE press would publish this book!!!

Book's Problem Solutions and Figures:
The solutions to the end-of-chapter problems and the figures seen in "CMOS Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation," are found at the book's website. They are in pdf format and can be downloaded (for free) by anyone.