Acknowledgement

First and foremost I’m indebted to my girlfriend, Astrid, for her love, understanding and her endurance in listening to all my rants, I often had throughout the whole time I’ve been working towards my PhD.

Many thanks go to Prof. Tibor Grasser for granting me a position as a PhD candidate. He always provided me with many insights and useful advice. Additionally, he gave me a lot of opportunities to get to know highly ranked scientists and supported my studies as a professor of the TU Wien.

I’m also indebted to Karl Rupp for reading through the spherical harmonics centered chapter of this thesis. He also provided great insight into the time-dependent H-transformed spherical harmonics expanded Boltzmann Transport equation, about which I wanted to write a paper. Unfortunately, we could not complete all investigations in time to publish our work elsewhere. I really enjoyed the short time I was allowed to work with him on ViennaSHE. With respect to spherical harmonics expansions many thanks go to Prof. Christoph Jungemann. He did not hesitate to provide advice as well as simulation data to verify software I’ve written whenever necessary. Additionally, he acted as second examiner of my thesis.

To great length I am indebted to Stanislav Tyaginov, who heavily supported me in my endeavor into the subject of hot-carrier degradation. When I was pessimistic he was quick to help out with a funny (at least to me and that’s the only thing that matters) and to my liking inappropriate joke to break the ice. Working and discussing matters with Stanislav was a true pleasure, although he often would complain about long sentences in my publications, like the last one. Without his help I most likely would not have been able to finish my PhD.

During my thesis I had the pleasure to get to know Ben Kaczer, Maria Toledano and Franco Jacopo from imec, Leuven. I would like to thank them for all their help, hour long fruitful discussions and measurement data. I am especially indebted to Ben Kaczer for inviting me to be a reviewer of scientific papers for journals of the IEEE.

Many thanks go to Wolfgang Gös, who, with great endurance, read most of this thesis in order to raise its quality to an acceptable level. He also taught me everything I know about non-radiative multiphonon transitions. Thanks also go to Franz Schanovsky who helped me to improve the quality of this thesis.

To my grandfathers, Herbert and Karl