Welcome to the Institute for Microelectronics' twenty-fifth annual research review! The staff, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, unfortunately has not increased after last year's reduction. Therefore, the staff consists, as before, of eight full-time and three part-time employees: four professors, two full-time and two part-time scientists, a secretary, one part-time and one full-time technical assistant. The two part-time scientists financed by the federal budget have been upgraded to full employment with funds from scientific projects. In addition, thirty scientists and one part-time technical assistant are presently funded through projects supported by our industrial partners, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft (CDG), and by projects within the EC Framework Programme. Most of our separately funded scientists are also working towards their doctoral degrees. Thus, compared to the previous report, the number of additionally funded members of the institute is stable.
During the last year, the START project on the simulation of modern semiconductor devices funded by the Austrian Science Fund, which has been running for seven years, has been successfully completed. One project within the Information Society Technologies (IST) program, namely SUPERTHEME ("Circuit Stability Under Process Variability and Electro-Thermal-Mechanical Coupling") has been initiated. The project MOSILSPIN (an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council), the IST projects MORDRED and NanoHiTEC, the Christian Doppler Laboratory on "Reliability Issues in Microelectronics", as well as eight projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund, are continuing according to plan where three of the latter started in the reporting period. We are very glad that our industrial partners have continued their cooperation and some new projects have been initiated.
We are very proud of the high academic and scientific output that our institute is producing and this is reflected by the respectable number of long-term projects and the all time high number of publications, especially contributions to and participations in international conferences. However, we are aware that this success is based considerably on our cooperating partners within academia and industry. Therefore, we would like to explicitly express here our gratitude for their trust in our scientific work. In this sense, we are entering the second half of the third decade of our institute with high expectations.