Contact resistance

About: Contact resistance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 15262 publications have been published within this topic receiving 232144 citations. The topic is also known as: electrical contact resistance & ECR.

Contact resistance extraction in pentacene thin film transistors

Abstract: We report on the contact resistances for pentacene thin film transistors with two different designs: top and bottom contact configurations (referred to as TC and BC TFTs, respectively) for two different contact metals (gold and palladium). The extraction was done based on the dependencies of the channel resistances on the gate length and gate voltage. The extracted gold TC TFT contact resistance depends on VGS, but shows no dependence on the drain bias. The TC TFT contact resistance is comparable to or exceeds the channel resistance for channels shorter than approximately 10 μm. The contact resistance of BC TFTs depends both on gate and drain bias. We propose a circuit simulating the BC TFT contact resistance and verify the circuit applicability by extracting and comparing the TFT channel resistances at different drain voltages. Our results reveal an important role played by contact resistances and provide an accurate model of the contact phenomena suitable for implementation in Spice or other circuit simulators.

Specific contact resistance of metal-semiconductor barriers

Abstract: The specific contact resistance at zero bias, R c , serves as a measure of the ohmic or rectifying behavior of a metal-semiconductor barrier under operating conditions. It is thus an important design parameter for semiconductor devices. The values of R c have been calculated for Metal-Si and metal-GaAs barriers on p -type and n -type samples. The theoretical calculation is based on the generalized transport study of metal-semiconductor systems. The results, which are presented graphically, show the dependence of R c on temperature over the range 50°K–500°K, the barrier height from 0.2 to 1.0 eV, and the ionized impurity concentration from 10 14 to 10 21 cm −3 . Generally R c decreases exponentially with increasing temperature and with decreasing barrier height. For samples with lower dopings where the thermionic emission dominates, R c is essentially independent of doping; for higher dopings where the tunneling dominates, R c decreases rapidly with increasing doping. The experimental results of R c for various metals on silicon samples are in good agreement with the predictions.

Contacting carbon nanotubes selectively with low-ohmic contacts for four-probe electric measurements

Abstract: Contact resistances of multiwalled nanotubes deposited on gold contact fingers are very large. We show that the contact resistances decrease by orders of magnitudes when the contact areas are selectively exposed to the electron beam in a scanning electron microscope. The focused electron beam enables the selection of one particular nanotube for electrical measurement in a four-terminal configuration, even if a loose network of nanotubes is deposited on the gold electrodes. For all measured nanotubes, resistance values lie in a narrow range of 0.35–2.6 kΩ at room temperature.

Measurement Techniques for Thermal Conductivity and Interfacial Thermal Conductance of Bulk and Thin Film Materials

Abstract: Thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductance play crucial roles in the design of engineering systems where temperature and thermal stress are of concerns. To date, a variety of measurement techniques are available for both bulk and thin film solid-state materials with a broad temperature range. For thermal characterization of bulk material, the steady-state absolute method, laser flash diffusivity method, and transient plane source method are most used. For thin film measurement, the 3{\omega} method and transient thermoreflectance technique including both frequency-domain and time-domain analysis are employed widely. This work reviews several most commonly used measurement techniques. In general, it is a very challenging task to determine thermal conductivity and interface contact resistance with less than 5% error. Selecting a specific measurement technique to characterize thermal properties need to be based on: 1) knowledge on the sample whose thermophysical properties is to be determined, including the sample geometry and size, and preparation method; 2) understanding of fundamentals and procedures of the testing technique and equipment, for example, some techniques are limited to samples with specific geometrics and some are limited to specific range of thermophysical properties; 3) understanding of the potential error sources which might affect the final results, for example, the convection and radiation heat losses.

Contact resistance in few and multilayer graphene devices

Abstract: The contact resistance of metals on backgated graphene field-effect transistors is studied. The residual resistance obtained at high backgate voltage is found to be in excellent agreement with the extracted values of contact resistance from transfer length measurements on graphene flakes. The contact resistance is found to be a significant contributor to the total resistance of graphene-based devices. The specific contact resistance is shown to be independent of the applied backgate voltage and the number of graphene layers.