This book is a good choice to learn mask design if you want to keep it as simple and cook-book like as possible. The book focuses on basic CMOS digital. Approximately 80 percent of all mask design is in CMOS digital, so that makes sense. Ancillary topics are brought up, such as simplified electronic conceptualizations of transistors, resistors, capacitance, current density, it even touches on more specialized areas such as floor planning and routing. This book covers a lot of ground lightly, but never with any engineering depth. I ignored those areas where, in my opinion, the author crossed the line of over-simplification for the sake of simplicity (the indication of current flow in P transistors is well meaning but incorrect, for example), in my earliest review of this book. But now that several years have passed and I have seen first-hand how this has at times confused mask design students, I feel that it should be mentioned.
Engineers and experienced mask designers should consider one of the more in-depth books, such as The Art of Analog Layout, or IC Layout Basics: A Practical Guide, or IC Mask Design: Essential Layout Techniques, or one of the many VLSI Design 101 texts for electronic engineering students.
Purchase "The Art of Analog Layout" if you want to focus on analog mask design issues, or any of the above-mentioned books for the more specialized or difficult material such as analog layout, the bipolar transistor, power, VFET, MESFET, heterojunction, GaAs, SiGe, discrete, infra-red low bandgap materials, light collection, minority carriers, high voltage layout techniques, or anything more difficult, advanced, unusual, or for engineers versus mask designers. "The Art of Analog Layout" is so good as to be an excellent reference for even the working mask designer and engineer.
Everyone is different. Perhaps if you wish to learn mask design as if it were more like drafting, as some vocational schools still do, then this book is for you. I'm a senior analog chip design engineer and an advanced-level mask designer. I've worked with beginning mask designers. My opinion is that the mask-design-like-drafting path does not an excellent mask designer make, and one of the above-mentioned books would be better to learn by, even if less simple.
