Acknowledgment

First from all I want to thank my advisor, Professor Selberherr, who provided me with a perfect working environment. His exceptional international reputation and his close contacts to the international semiconductor industry allowed me to gain a lot of experience and to keep in touch with up to date technology issues. I am also grateful to Professor Hauser for his support and his service on my examining committee.

I have to express my thanks to Infineon Villach for financial support of this thesis and the people I was cooperating with at Infineon Munich and Infineon Graz, especially to Rainer Hagenbeck for many interesting discussions and his support of my work. Special thanks to Oliver Lohse from the Technische Hochschule Aachen, as he performed many essential measurements for me.

It is a pleasure to express my thanks to the people I cooperated with at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Suwon/South Korea, namely to Dr. Byoung-Ho Cheong for the perfect organization of my internship, and to Dr. Chung for the fruitful scientific cooperation.

Special thanks to Charles Dachs from Philips Research/Eindhoven for the interesting time during my internship, the perfect organization and his attempts to show me the glamorous aspects of Eindhoven.

I am very grateful to all my colleagues at the Institute for Microelectronics. Special thanks goes to Martin Knaipp, who supported my bootstraping at the institute. Furthermore I have to express my gratitude to Tibor Grasser, Robert Mlekus and Robert Klima. Their efforts for the development of MINIMOS-NT provided a solid basis for my work. In this context I want to thank Christian Troger, Thomas Binder and Rudolf Strasser for the perfect administration of our Linux cluster. Special thanks as well to Robert Kosik and Wolfgang Pyka for many fruitful discussions concerning my work.

Of course I have to mention my colleague I shared office with for the last three years, Vassil Palankovski. I will never forget our thrilling conversations on chauvinism, especially on the topics of whether the Austrians or the Bulgarians ``invented'' semiconductor physics, radio transmission, computers, and lazy soccer players. Special thanks as well to the part time inhabitant of our office, Rüdiger Quay. Even though from Germany, his exceptional sense of humor, his education and his intelligence made it a pleasure to spend the evenings with him and a few pints of Guinness.

Special thanks to my colleagues from the lunch and network testing group, ``Highlander'' Christian Harlander, `` Anne Dy'' Andreas Hössinger, ``Saba'' Rainer Sabelka, ``Cerv'' Johann Cervenka,``Wolfine''Wolfgang Pyka, and Heinrich Kirchauer for the interesting and funny discussions during lunch time and after. Not to forget Peter Fleischmann, who introduced me into the secrets of system administration and Japanese culture.

Special thanks go to my sister, Eva Dragosits, who spent several nights in order to improve my English.

Finally, I thank my parents, as their support was of vital importance for my personal and academic advancement.