\chapter*{Acknowledgements}
Nowadays, scientific research is hardly possible without a strong team effort.
And so also the thesis presented here would not have been possible without the great support of many people, to whom I would like to express my gratitude on the last page.

First and foremost, this applies to my supervisor \mbox{Prof. Dr. Ulrich Uwer} who gave me the opportunity to join his group and work on an exciting research topic.
During the many years of this thesis, he always gave useful advice and provided constant support and encouragement, which really meant a lot to me.

Furthermore, I would like to thank \mbox{Prof. Dr. Klaus Reygers} for the interest in my work and for reviewing this dissertation, as well as \mbox{Prof. Dr. Tilman Plehn} and \mbox{Prof. Dr. Ulrich A. Glasmacher} for completing the examination committee.

This thesis has been carried out in the context of the LHCb \scifitracker{}, which involves people from more than a dozen institutes actively working together on the project.
For this reason I would like to express my gratitude to all members of the SciFi collaboration who directly or indirectly contributed to this work.

A special word of thanks goes to Xiaoxue Han from whom I have learned a lot over the last years of tightly working together.
I could always count on her support and would hereby also like to offer my appreciation for proofreading parts of this thesis.

In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues from the SciFi electronics team --
in particular Magali Magne, Wilco Vink, Maurício Féo, José Mazorra de Cos, Olivier Le Dortz, André Massafferri and Diogo Ayres Rocha for a close collaboration on various topics throughout this work.
Special thanks goes to Lukas Witola with whom I worked closely together during the commissioning and who has gradually taken over many of my responsibilities.
In the context of the commissioning, I would also like to express my gratitude to the LHCb Online group for providing extensive support in the areas of the DAQ system and the network infrastructure.

I would like to thank the entire Heidelberg LHCb group for a great working environment and the nice get-togethers for coffee and cake.
Thanks to my (former) Heidelberg SciFi colleagues Blake Leverington, Sebastian Bachmann, Albert Comerma, Michał Dziewiecki and David Gerick for fruitful discussions in our hardware meetings in earlier phases of the project.

And last but not least, I would like to thank my family and friends for their continuous support and for always believing in me.
Without having them at my back, this thesis would not have been possible.
