An Investigation of Transmission Line Modeling Test Structure in TCAD

As semiconductor devices shrinks down to sub 10nm range, contact resistance has become a significant performance factor that needs to be studied. Existing test structures such as Transmission line model (TLM) structures are no longer sensitive enough to determine the small changes in specific contact resistance (SCR) at confidence level. This paper reports a methodology to determine SCR in a TLM test structure using Sentaurus Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD). The tool is demonstrated to be effective to model and characterize test structures with TCAD. An analysis on the correlation between doping concentration and ohmic contact was investigated. The SCR value is calculated from the extracted total resistance using the analytical model of TLM test structure.