Acknowledgment

I thank Prof. Selberherr and Prof. Langer for providing me with the support I could enjoy during the work on this thesis. The weekly seminars of Prof. Selberherr always stimulated to find new ways of solving non-trivial problems.

I thank Prof. Kosina for his help since the very beginning. He is a great scientist and great teacher. I am grateful to him for teaching me a lot of tricks on Monte Carlo methods. The same must be said about Mihail Nedjalkov. Together they created a real school with its own style and scientific language on Monte Carlo modeling of transport in semiconductors and I am proud to be trained in this school by these outstanding experts. The knowledge I got from Prof. Kosina and Prof. Nedjalkov is a real treasure which is beyond any price.

I thank Andreas Gehring for his great help not only in the Institute but also in general in my life in Vienna. He was so kind to be my translator from German so many times and never refused to help with filling in numerous documents since the very beginning till the very end. Visa, bank account, shops, library are only a few examples where his help was so invaluable. But most of all I was impressed by his strong knowledge of device simulation especially of tunneling. I was lucky to work all this time together with him in the same room.

Markus Gritsch was my second room colleague at the beginning. And I was lucky again. He was always so kind to answer all my questions about LaTeX and Linux in general. His deep knowledge always impressed me and helped a lot.

Soon after Markus left the Institute, Stefan Holzer came into my room and I learnt a lot from him about modern hardware and software. He is a real expert in this area.

Tesfaye Ayalew told me a lot of interesting things about modern semiconductor devices and his questions to me were always useful for myself.

Interesting and fruitful discussions I shared with other colleagues among whom Jong Mun Park, Robert Klima, Robert Kosik, Robert Entner, Stephan Enzo Ungersböck, Klaus-Tibor Grasser and many others too numerous to mention here.

I would like to thank Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, USA and Semiconductor Research Corporation, USA for supporting this thesis.

S. Smirnov: