Welcome to the 19^th annual research review of the Institute for Microelectronics! The staff, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research (former name: Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture), has been increased by two positions and consists now of eight full-time and four part-time employees: the head of the institute, three additional professors, one full-time and three part-time scientists, a secretary, two technical assistants, and one apprentice. Twenty-two additional scientists are funded through scientific projects supported by our industrial partners, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), by the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft (CDG), and by the EC Framework Programme. Most of these separately funded co-workers are working towards their doctoral degrees.

During the last year the EC project PROMENADE, a so-called Specific Targeted Project, and the Network of Excellence SINANO have been successfully completed. The four projects within the Information Society Technologies (IST) program, named D-DOT FET, PULLNANO, SUGERT, and TARGET, are being continued. Additionally, several projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund have been initiated successfully, and the START project on the simulation of modern semiconductor devices has been positively evaluated. We are very glad that our industrial partners have continued the cooperation: some new projects have been started and others are still under discussion. Furthermore, the work within the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Technology CAD in Microelectronics is progressing well in the second period.

It is a great pleasure for me to be able to report that Tibor Grasser received a "Dr. Wolfgang Houska Award" as one of ten Austrian scientists, two of whom belong to the Vienna University of Technology.

Regarding the 11^th International Workshop on Computational Electronics and the Companion Workshop on Modeling of Reliability Issues, organized by our institute at our university in May 2006, we feel very glad about the positive feedback.

We are very proud of the high academic and scientific output of our institute, which is reflected by the respectable number of long-term projects and the all-time-high number of publications, especially contributions and participations in international conferences. Furthermore, we are particularly pleased with the number of co-workers who finished their doctoral dissertations at our institute. We are aware that this success is based considerably on our cooperating partners. Therefore, we would like to explicitly express our gratitude here for their trust in our scientific work. In this sense, we are entering the next year of our institute with a continuously high motivation.