Extracting contact misalignment from 4- and 6-terminal contact resistors

A heuristic model is derived from simulations describing quantitatively the effect of contact misalignment on four- and six-terminal contact resistance measurements with L-type test structures. The four-terminal resistor pair allows only the extraction of the sum of the misalignment components and the extraction of the average interfacial resistance of the two contacts while a quantitative evaluation is restricted to such small misalignments that the second-order effect can be neglected. The six-terminal contact resistor allows the separation of the misalignment components and the determination of a single interfacial resistance while the magnitude of the misalignment can extend into the validity range of the second-order model