Contact Resistance and Contact Resistivity

This paper mainly offers guidance to the technologist who has to characterize metal‐semiconductor contacts for process development and production control. To abolish confusion clear definitions are proposed for the terms contact resistance and contact resistivity. Based on these definitions, methods of determining contact resistivity are discussed, revealing the common source of error of the methods and making comparisons. New methods like the TLM method are described and included in the comparison. Results of contact resistivity measurements on Al‐Si contacts over a wide range of silicon surface doping are presented.