I would like to thank all members of the Institute for Microelectronics for the very good working atmosphere. I am very grateful for the continuous support and encouragement by my advisor Professor Siegfried Selberherr. I would also like to point out his financial support to attend several exciting international conferences all over the world. Due to his excellent contacts to the semiconductor industry he was able to support me with an outstanding working environment. During my work at the Institute I enjoyed four generations of workstations which demonstrates the ongoing hardware progress in the world and at the Institute. It makes a lot of fun to work on fast computers which represent the state of the art. He also made it possible for me to take a research position for two months at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California, USA. This stay gave me a different view to our projects because at a university one may see many problems through pink glasses.
I have to thank my colleges Robert Mlekus, Christoph Pichler, Richard Plasun, Mustafa Radi and Rudolf Strasser for testing my software and reporting errors. It helped a lot that they didn't only say it's not working but always showed me a reproducible situation which made it easy to correct bugs. The discussions with Franz Fasching and Stefan Halama about the generic approach to solve a problem was always fascinating. Gerhard Schrom was the one who helped me seeing the whole project instead of only specific problems within my doctoral studies.
Last but not least, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my family for continuous support during my long studies at home. I also have to thank many of my friends for their private help outside of the university in my rare spare time.
The research work at the Institute has been sponsored by the research laboratories of AUSTRIA MIKRO SYSTEMS at Unterpremstätten, Austria; CHRISTIAN DOPPLER Forschungsgesellschaft at Vienna, Austria; DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION at Hudson, USA; HITACHI at Tokyo, Japan; MOTOROLA at Austin, USA; NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR at Santa Clara, USA; SIEMENS at Munich, FRG; and SONY at Atsugi, Japan, and by the ,,Forschungsförderungsfonds für die gewerbliche Wirtschaft``, project 2/285 and project 2/299, as part of ADEQUAT (JESSI project BT1B), ESPRIT project 7236, and by ADEQUAT II (JESSI project BT11), ESPRIT project 8002.