Welcome to the twenty-third annual research review of the Institute for Microelectronics! The staff, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, has been fortunate to increase by one scientist and now consists of eight full-time and five part-time employees: four professors, two full-time and four part-time scientists, a secretary, one part-time and one full-time technical assistant. The four part-time scientists financed by the federal budget have been upgraded to full employment with funds from scientific projects. In addition, twenty-two scientists are presently funded through projects supported by our industrial partners, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), by 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.
During the last year, the EC project ATHENIS has been successfully completed and one project within the Information Society Technologies (IST) program, namely MORDRED ("Modelling of degradation and reliability of crystalline materials") has been started. The project MOSILSPIN (an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council), the ENIAC project MODERN, the Christian Doppler Laboratory on "Reliability Issues in Microelectronics" as well as several projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund including the START project on the simulation of modern semiconductor devices are continuing according to plan. We are very glad that our industrial partners have continued the cooperation: new projects have started and more are under discussion.
Furthermore, 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. However, we are aware that this success is based considerably on our cooperating partners. Therefore, we would like to explicitly express here our gratitude for their trust in our scientific work. In this sense, we are entering the next year of our institute with high expectations.