I would like to thank Prof. Siegfried Selberherr who has always provided me with the best working environment possible. His great experience and industrial long term relations have opened the door for me to the world's semiconductor industry. I am also very grateful to Prof. Emmerich Bertagnolli who has drawn my attention to semiconductor manufacturing issues and who agreed to take part in the examining committee on a very short notice.
I want to express my deep gratitude to Andreas Wild from Motorola who greatly stimulated this work. He has always provided me with valuable new visions and challenges during our permanent correspondence and numerous private conversations. A special thanks goes to Jack Higman, Alexander Höfler, Michael Khazhinsky, Marius Orlowski, and Karl Wimmer from Motorola, Austin, Texas, for the impressive time during my internship. They offered me the chance to gain a lot of practical experience in a great working environment and presented Austin from its most wonderful side.
I am very grateful to Gerhard Schrom who always took the time to answer my questions thoroughly and who provided excellent proofreading comments on this work. I gained a lot of practical experience when I worked with him during my internship with Intel, Hillsboro, Oregon. Thanks to all the people from Intel, especially Shekhar Borkar, Vivek De, Paul Packan, Sunit Tyagi, and Scott Yu who offered me a deep insight into one of the world's leading semiconductor companies.
I am very grateful to all my colleagues at the Institute of Microelectronics. The atmosphere has always been a perfect source of motivation. It was a great pleasure to work with Rudolf Strasser who provided the basis for this work creating SIESTA. I was lucky enough to have him as a roommate as I could benefit from his universal knowledge and quick resoluteness. I would like to thank Tibor Grasser for developing MINIMOS-NT into one of the world's leading device simulators. His ears have always been open for my numerous requests to add new features which served my needs. I am also very grateful to Thomas Binder for extending my knowledge about operating systems, Prof. Hans Kosina for his great support on semiconductor physics, Robert Mlekus for answering all my questions about computer programming and installation procedures, Vassil Palankovski for proofreading my final work, Richard Plasun for implementing the optimizer capabilities into SIESTA, Martin Rottinger for his great support on various layout issues, and Christian Troger for helping me whenever the computers seemed to go on strike.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to express my deep gratitude to my parents, Brigitta and Franz, for their loving support, and to Laura who made this work sound a little bit English.