Electrical and structural characterization of metal germanides

Abstract

Metal-semiconductor contacts have been widely studied in the past 60 years. These structures are of importance in the microelectronics industry. As the scaling down of silicon-based complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices becomes more and more challenging, new material and device structures to relax this physical limitation in device scaling are now required. Germanium (Ge) has been proposed as a potential alternative to silicon.