First and foremost I’m indebted to my girlfriend, Astrid, for her love, understanding and her
endurance in listening to all my rants, I often had throughout the whole time I’ve been working
towards my PhD.
Many thanks go to Prof. Tibor Grasser for granting me a position as a PhD candidate. He always
provided me with many insights and useful advice. Additionally, he gave me a lot of opportunities to
get to know highly ranked scientists and supported my studies as a professor of the TU Wien.
I’m also indebted to Karl Rupp for reading through the spherical harmonics centered chapter of this
thesis. He also provided great insight into the time-dependent H-transformed spherical harmonics
expanded Boltzmann Transport equation, about which I wanted to write a paper. Unfortunately, we
could not complete all investigations in time to publish our work elsewhere. I really enjoyed the short
time I was allowed to work with him on ViennaSHE. With respect to spherical harmonics expansions
many thanks go to Prof. Christoph Jungemann. He did not hesitate to provide advice as well as
simulation data to verify software I’ve written whenever necessary. Additionally, he acted as second
examiner of my thesis.
To great length I am indebted to Stanislav Tyaginov, who heavily supported me in my endeavor into
the subject of hot-carrier degradation. When I was pessimistic he was quick to help out
with a funny (at least to me and that’s the only thing that matters) and to my liking
inappropriate joke to break the ice. Working and discussing matters with Stanislav was a true
pleasure, although he often would complain about long sentences in my publications, like
the last one. Without his help I most likely would not have been able to finish my PhD.
During my thesis I had the pleasure to get to know Ben Kaczer, Maria Toledano and Franco Jacopo
from imec, Leuven. I would like to thank them for all their help, hour long fruitful discussions and
measurement data. I am especially indebted to Ben Kaczer for inviting me to be a reviewer of
scientific papers for journals of the IEEE.
Many thanks go to Wolfgang Gös, who, with great endurance, read most of this thesis in order to raise
its quality to an acceptable level. He also taught me everything I know about non-radiative
multiphonon transitions. Thanks also go to Franz Schanovsky who helped me to improve the quality
of this thesis.
To my grandfathers, Herbert and Karl