Welcome to the twenty-fourth annual research review of the Institute for Microelectronics! The staff, financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, unfortunately has been reduced by two part-time scientists and now consists 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-one 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 Program. Most of our separately funded scientists are also working towards their doctoral degrees. Thus, compared to the previous report, the number of additionally funded scientists has increased by about 50 percent.
During the last year, the ENIAC project MODERN has been successfully completed and one project within the Information Society Technologies (IST) program, namely NanoHiTEC ("Nano-structured High-efficiency Thermo-Electric Converters") has started. The project MOSILSPIN (an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council), the IST project MORDRED, 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. Furthermore, five new research projects have been granted by the Austrian Science Fund and work on these projects is continuing. 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 considerably based 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.