In the last 50 years, our economy and society have obviously been influenced and shaped to a great extent by electronic devices. This substantial impact of electronics is the result of a continuous performance improvement based on the scaling, i.e. shrinking, of MOSFET devices in complementary integrated circuits, following Moore's law. As the MOSFET feature sizes are approaching atomistic dimensions, the scaling trend slowed down considerably and is even threatened for sub-10 nm technology nodes. Further, additional advancements are increasingly difficult to realize both from the technological and especially the economical perspective. Therefore, technologies that have the potential to supersede the CMOS technology in the future are the topic of intensive investigation by both researchers and the industry. An attractive solution is the leveraging of existing semiconductor technologies based on emerging research devices (ERD) offering novel characteristics, which enable new circuit architectures in future nanoscale logic circuits. A possible ERD contender are polarity controllable or reconfigurable MOSFET (RFET) concepts. Generally, RFET devices are able to switch between n- and p-type conduction by the application of an electrical signal. Therefore, RFET promise increased complex systems with a lower device count decreasing the costs per basic logic function based on their higher logic expressiveness. The focus of this work lies in the successful transfer of a predecessor silicon nanowire (NW) RFET technology into a planar RFET device, while simultaneously optimizing the resulting RFET for reconfigurable as well as conventional CMOS circuits. As for the predecessor NW RFET, the planar approach features a doping-less CMOS compatible fabrication process on a conventional SOI substrate and obtains its reconfigurability by electrostatic doping. The device can be regarded as a entanglement of two MOSFET in one structure, i.e. a depletion mode FET centered on top of a backside enhancement mode Schottky barrier FET (SBFET). The backside SBFET establishes the conductive channel consisting of the desired charge carrier type via an appropriate potential on its gate electrode. The topside FET controls the charge carrier flow between source and drain by locally depleting this channel given an opposite potential on its gate electrode with respect to the backside gate electrode. Two generations of devices have been successfully processed, while different gate electrode materials, i.e. nickel, aluminum and reactively sputtered tungsten-titanium-nitride, have been introduced to the device structure. As n- and p-type symmetry of the very same device is essential for RFET circuit design, tungsten-titanium-nitride is experimentally identified as a possible mid-gap metal gate electrode for RFET devices. Also, a Schottky barrier adjustment process for ideal n- and p-type symmetry based on silicide induced dopant segregation is experimentally demonstrated. Extensive electrical characterizations supported by calibrated TCAD simulations are presented, demonstrating experimental sub-threshold slopes of 65 mV/dec and on-to-off current ratios of over 9 decades. Based on TCAD simulations and supported by experimental results, the design space of the device concept is explored in order to gather predictive results for future scaled device optimization. Further, the high temperature (HT) performance is evaluated and compared to the predecessor NW RFET devices as well as to a state-of-the-art industrial high reliability HT MOSFET clearly illustrating the on par performance of the planar RFET concept with respect to off-state leakage current.