Invention of the transistor in 1947 made a radical change to the path of the development of electronic products and systems. In the mid-1950s, integrated circuits (ICs) started evolving rapidly, creating miniaturized analog, digital and mixed signal circuits. By the 1960s to 1970s, microprocessors, memories and power semiconductors entered the electronic marketplace. During the 1980s and 1990s, power supplies required to power the high-performance digital circuits kept dropping towards 2 V and below. By the year 2000, complex digital and mixed- signal circuits required for portable gadgets were powered by very low dc rails as low as 1 V and sub-1 V. Very large-scale ICs and ultra-large scale ICs proliferated after 2000, integrating millions to billions of sub-micron feature transistors. The ultimate result of this massive progress came with the unique problem of vulnerability of modern electronics to transient surges. A detailed background to this is presented in Chapter 1 of reference [1].
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