Consideration of the effect of barrier height on the variation of specific contact resistance with temperature

Temperature variation during semiconductor device operation can be significant and how this affects contact resistance is investigated. This paper reports improvements to analytical modeling for determining specific contact resistance (SCR) by including the effect of temperature. A technique for extracting the value of SCR using technology computer-aided design (TCAD) modeling is also demonstrated. SCR results obtained for analytical and TCAD models for metal-to-silicon contacts are compared and this shows the significance of temperature in the analytical model. Small changes in electron affinity and, hence, barrier height due to changes in temperature must be considered in order to obtain reliable analytical expressions for SCR.