First, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Tibor Grasser, for supervising me throughout my PhD study, supporting me in academic questions whenever needed, and also for securing the funding necessary for my employment.
I would like to thank Michael Waltl, who has been my colleague when I started my PhD studies and later acquired funding for a project where I have been contributing to. He developed the custom measurement equipment I used for most of my characterization experiments and helped me whenever I encountered issues with my measurements.
I also want to thank reasearchers working at other institutions whom I collaborated with. Among them Joerg Appenzeller from Purdue university, Ken Sawada from Sony, Franz Schanovsky from GTS, and the members of the device reliability group at imec Leuven, in particular Ben Kaczer, Marko Simicic and Pieter Weckx, where I spent an interesting time during an internship.
I want to thank my colleagues, especially Alexander Grill, Markus Jech, Markus Kampl, Theresia Knobloch, Robert Kosik, Gerhard Rzepa, Bianka Ullmann and Yannick Wimmer, for valuable discussions and input, and Jakob Michl, Christian Schleich, and Dominic Waldhör who further contributed to this work by proofreading it.
Further, I want to thank our non-scientific staff at the institute for microelectronics, including Ewald Haslinger, Manfred Katterbauer, Diana Pop, and Markus Schloffer, who supported me in various other matters, and for ensuring a good working environment on our institute.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, especially my parents Irene and Vinzenz, my brother Andreas, and my girlfriend Carmen.
