I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the direct and indirect help of many people who made this thesis possible.
First, I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to my advisor, Professor Siegfried Selberherr whose constant encouragement and support were always present in spite of the physical distance that separated us. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Professor Selberherr guidance during those tiring times when I had doubts about ever completing a doctoral degree. Appreciation is also expressed to Professor Fritz Paschke for serving on my examining committee on such a short notice.
This work has been performed while I am employed at Digital Equipment Corporation in the ULSI Operations Group. The support and assistance of my management at Digital, namely Dr. Llanda Richardson and Dr. Rich Hollingsworth were critical in all the stages of this pursuit. My gratitude is also extended to my supervisors during that period, Dr. Marden Seavey and Mr. Len Gruber for their invaluable help and friendship.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to collaborate with many special people who contributed to the successful completion of this thesis. I would like to acknowledge the early contributions of Marden Seavey in simulators calibration work which resulted in the first task module prototype. John Faricelli's contribution has been instrumental in the development of the inverse modeling profiling techniques and the avalanche model calibration application. I thank Len Gruber for collaboration in our effort to understand the statistical aspects of semiconductor manufacturing and technology characterization. I am indebted to several of my colleagues who were involved directly with the applications presented including David Bell, Jerry Huang, Gerd Nanz, Phil Oldiges, and Rafael Rios. I am also grateful to many others for help in one form or another during the course of this work, namely Narain Arora, Larry Bair, Gabriel Bischoff, Andre Nasr, Kartik Raol, Christian Schiebl, Hamid Soleimani, and Martin Thurner.
I would also like to acknowledge all the past, present, and future developers of VISTA at the Technical University of Vienna. Particularly, I am grateful to Stefan Halama and Christoph Pichler with whom I worked more closely on integrating the task module in VISTA.
Finally, my sincere and deepest appreciation goes to my wife Amal for her love and support throughout the past few years. Her enduring patience and understanding were especially critical after the birth of our second child.
To Amal,
and to our sons, Kareem and Chady,
I dedicate this thesis.