Welcome to the twenty-second annual research review of the Institute for Microelectronics! The staff, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, now consists of seven 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, one part-time and two full-time technical assistants. Twenty-five 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 research programs from the European Union. Most of our separately funded scientists are working towards their doctoral degrees.
During the last year the EC project D-DOT FET and the Christian Doppler Laboratory on "Technology CAD in Microelectronics" were successfully completed. We are pleased to report that Hajdin Ceric succeeded in starting a new Christian Doppler Laboratory on "Reliability Issues in Microelectronics". The project ATHENIS within the Information Society Technologies (IST) program as well as several projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund including the START project on the simulation of modern semiconductor devices are continuing well. We are very glad that our industrial partners have continued the cooperation: some new projects have started up and others are still under discussion.
It is a great pleasure for me to be able to report that Siegfried Selberherr received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council on the topic "Modeling Silicon Spintronics (MOSILSPIN)". This most prominent European research grant with a duration of five years and an exceptional budget represents an extraordinary achievement for our institute.
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 young scientists who finished their doctoral dissertations at our institute. We are aware that this success is considerably based upon our cooperating partners. Therefore, we would like to explicitly express our gratitude for their trust in our scientific work. In this spirit, we are entering the next year of our institute with great motivation.