Electrical characterization of semiconductor materials and devices—review

Semiconductor materials and devices continue to occupy a pre-eminent technological position because of their importance in building integrated electronic systems for wide ranging applications from computers, cell-phones, personal digital assistants, digital cameras and electronic entertainment systems, to electronic instrumentation for medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring. A key ingredient of this technological dominance has been the rapid advances in the quality and processing of materials—semiconductors, conductors and insulators—thus providing the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor device technology with its important characteristics of negligible standby power dissipation, good input–output isolation, surface potential control and reliable operation. However, in assessing the material quality and device reliability, it is important to have non-destructive, accurate and easy-to-use electrical characterization techniques available, so that important parameters such as carrier doping density, type and mobility of carriers, interface quality, oxide trap density, semiconductor bulk defect density, contact and other parasitic resistances and oxide electrical integrity can be rapidly determined. This article describes some of the more widely used and popular techniques that are used to determine these important parameters. The techniques presented in this paper range in complexity and requirements for test structures. It ranges from the simple current–voltage measurements, to the more sophisticated low-frequency noise and deep-level transient spectroscopy techniques.