An in-depth treatment of CMOS process technology would go far beyond the scope of this introduction. Therefore, only a short overview is given in this section so as to introduce some of the terms used in this thesis. More details are given in the respective literature: general introductions are [78,66], more detailed descriptions of single processing steps are given in [24,10], and among the most up-to-date books on CMOS process technology are [89,88].