Wilfried Vandervorst

TL;DR: In this paper, a method for measuring the resistance or conductivity between two or more conductors which are placed against a semiconductor element, the conductors are placed either in contact with the top surface or one conductor is placed in the form of a large ohmic contact applied to the bottom surface of the semiconductor elements.

Abstract: The manufacturing of deep submicron devices requires the formation of very shallow, highly doped source/drain profiles. Besides the need to determine the correct atomic dopant distribution (using secondary ion mass spectrometry), there is an increasing demand for the accurate determination of the electrical carrier profiles related with the need to monitor the activation of the dopants under reduced thermal budgets. Conventional spreading resistance probe (SRP) has been widely used for this application due to its capability to measure the resistivity (and carrier) depth distribution in Si with a high geometrical resolution (nm) and high dynamic range (nine orders of magnitude). Unfortunately with the application towards very shallow profiles (junction depths less than 35 nm), the concurrent electrical resolution is influenced by several artifacts such as carrier spilling, surface damage, probe penetration, three-dimensional (3D)-current spreading, increasing correction factors, etc. From the spreading res...