The roots of this book can be traced back to the 1950s when one of us (KWB) started giving lectures of a young and intriguing emerging field – the physics of semiconductors. Semiconductor technology was in its infancy at that time, and the other of us (UWP) was just born. The accumulated and steadily updated lecture notes provided a broad background on semiconductor physics, and eventually – in 1990 – led to the edition of the Survey of Semiconductor Physics.