Tibor Grasser
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn., Head of Institute
Publications

Biography

Tibor Grasser is a professor of microelectronics reliability and an IEEE Fellow. He has been the head of the Institute for Microelectronics since 2016. He has edited various books, e.g. on advanced device modeling (World Scientific), the bias temperature instability (Springer) and hot carrier degradation (Springer), is a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE EDS, is a recipient of the Best and Outstanding Paper Awards at IRPS (2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014), IPFA (2013 and 2014), ESREF (2008) and the IEEE EDS Paul Rappaport Award (2011). He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices following his assignment as Associate Editor for Microelectronics Reliability (Elsevier) and has been involved in various outstanding conferences such as IEDM, IRPS, SISPAD, ESSDERC, and IIRW. Prof. Grasser's current research interests include theoretical modeling of performance aspects of 2D and 3D devices (charge trapping, reliability), starting from the ab initio level over more efficient quantum-mechanical descriptions up to TCAD modeling. The models developed in his group have been made available in the most important commercial TCAD environments.

Preface

Welcome to the Institute for Microelectronics’ 31st annual research review! Our permanent staff members, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, have remained unchanged from last year and consist of eight full-time and four part-time employees: Five professors, two senior scientists, a secretary and one part-time and two full-time technical assistants. In addition, one federally funded post-doctoral researcher and five doctoral researchers are working on exciting research problems. Furthermore, twenty scientists and eight post-doctoral researchers are presently funded through projects supported by our industrial partners, including the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft (CDG), as well as by projects within the European Commission Framework Programme.

Over the last year, two direct industrial cooperations, one European Union FP7 Research and Innovation funding programme (“Circuit Stability Under Process Variability and Electro-Thermal-Mechanical Coupling”), one ERC advanced grant (“Modeling Silicon Spintronics”), one project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (“Single-Trap Characterization Methodology for Nanoscale MOSFETs”) and the Information Society Technologies project “Stability under Process Variability for Advanced Interconnects and Devices Beyond 7nm node” (SUPERAID7) have been successfully completed. The CDG project on “High performance Technology CAD”, as well as four projects funded by the FWF and the FFG project “Innovative Communication Electronics for Aircraft Engines” are all proceeding according to plan.

We are very pleased that our industrial partners have continued and extended their support for a wide range of projects, such as reliability at cryogenic temperatures, potentials and risks of pilot technologies for power semiconductors regarding reliability, manufacturing and application, an efficient quantum transport model for TCAD applications, advanced MOSFET reliability characterization using array structures, modeling of hot-carrier degradation in Si-transistors and quantum mechanical simulation of tandem solar cells to study the influence of technological parameters on efficiency.

It is a great pleasure for us to report that two FFG projects, namely “Technology Computer Aided Design of Negative Capacitance and Ferro-Electric Transistors” and “Innovative Networks for Networked Aircraft Subsystems”, one direct cooperation, namely “Modeling the Reliability and Microstructure of Metallic Microheaters”, and two Christian Doppler Laboratories for “Nonvolatile Magnetoresistive Memory and Logic – NovoMemLog” and “Single-Defect Spectroscopy in Semiconductor Devices – SDS” have also been started during the past year.

We are exceptionally proud of our Institute's consistently high academic and scientific output. This is reflected in our large number of long-term projects and in our high number of publications, especially when it comes to contributing to and participating in international conferences. We are aware, however, that this success is based considerably on our collaborators within academia and industry. We would therefore like to explicitly express our gratitude for their trust in our scientific work. In this regard, we are entering into the next year of our Institute, as ever, with high expectations.