Acknowledgment

First of all I would like to thank my adviser Prof. Dr. Siegfried Selberherr for accepting me at the Institute for Microelectronics and helping me to solve the paper work problems at the TU Vienna. His leadership skills have made possible to create an incredible working environment at the institute that every student can ever dream of for their dissertation. His worldwide contacts at both the semiconductor industry and the academy have given to me this incredible opportunity. Also, I want to thank Dr. Edmundo A. Gutiérrez-Domínguez, because actually he put me in contact with the people of the Institute.

I wish to thank all my colleagues at the institute for an excellent working atmosphere and innumerable discussions about microelectronics, computer technologies, and also for their assistance. First of all I want to thank Robert Klima who has spent a lot of time explaining me how the programming environment works at the Institute, setting up my computer machine, installing all the modules and compiling it before I had a slight idea of how to make all of this by myself. Besides, I am grateful to him because he spent a lot of time helping me to solve many bureaucratic paper work at various Austrian offices before I could say Grüß Gott in perfect Vienesse.

Thanks to Michael Stockinger who introduce me to the makedevice program and actually taught me how to use many features of the MINIMOS-NT simulator. Also, thanks to Christian Troger for helping me to install all the software in my computer, to Robert Mlekus for setting up the CVS environment in my home directory, and to Tom Binder for letting me to run some simulations on his computer although he was not willing to allow it. I wish to thank to Robert Kosik for answering my philosophical questions about Vienna and Austria.

I am grateful to Vassil Palankovski who made for me the first arrangements at the University. Also, his incredible knowledge about the MINIMOS-NT source code has helped me not to mess around with. Thanks to Prof. Tibor Grasser for his general introduction to the discretization scheme used in MINIMOS-NT and Prof. Hans Kosina for his German-English lectures in TCAD. Thanks to Jong-Mun Park for sharing with me his experience in the microelectronics industry. To my roommates, Clemens Heitzinger, Hajdin Ceric, and Stephan Wagner mainly for letting me practice my poor German.

I wish to thank Andreas Gehring for accurately and diligently proof reading my thesis. Thanks to Igor Sosa Mayor for the German translation of the abstract and the proof reading of the Spanish translation. Thanks to Klaus Dragosits for his general comments on my thesis and the proof reading of the abstract in the German translation. Also, I want to thank him and his girlfriend Christiane for the most enjoyable evening at the Techniker Ball 2002. Thanks to Johann Cervenka, Christian Harlander, and Rainer Sabelka for fixing the network, installing software or just going for a beer. Thanks to Michail Nedjalkov for pointing out the difference between loser doctors and just doctors.

To all of my friends I have made in Vienna, I wish to thank you all of you. You have been like my family in Vienna all those years. Specially thanks to my parents and my sister in Mexico. They believe in me and their support, although they have not been here, is greatly appreciated.