Stress inside the chip results into deviations of the transistor performance. In this thesis, micromechanical indentation is introduced to study stress effects on the electrical characteristics of CMOS transistors. The approach combines non-destructive indentation to induce well defined localized stress, electrical characterization of ring oscillator circuits under load as well as finite element simulations to estimate the introduced stress.

3D characterization techniques and modeling methods provide deep insights into materials and their microstructure on all length scales. In this thesis a hybrid 3D image reconstruction approach developed to minimize the common imaging artifacts in HR-XCT to improve the image reconstruction quality. Subsequently, the reconstructed 3D data converted into finite element models to estimate mechanical properties of complex material systems.