A Test Structure for Assessing Individual Contact Resistance

Accurate measurement of contact resistance is crucial for advanced nanometer CMOS processes. An equally important requirement is to measure contact resistances in the same micro-environment as the device-under-test (DUT) will be used in real designs. With complicated interactions among various layout shapes in nanometer CMOS processes, test structures with adequate scalability is needed. In this paper we present a scalable contact resistance measurement structure, which can accommodate tens of thousands of DUTs. The measurement results from a 65 nm CMOS technology are also presented.