Resistors in integrated circuits (ICs) are implemented using diffused methods fabricated in the base and emitter regions of bipolar transistor or in source/drain regions of CMOS. Deposition of thin films on the wafer surface is another choice to fabricate the thin-film resistors in ICs’ applications. In this study, Ni(55%)Cr(40%)Si(5%) (abbreviated as NiCrSi) in wt % was used as the target and the sputtering method was used to deposit the thin-film resistors on Al2O3 substrates. NiCrSi thin-film resistors with different thicknesses of 30.8 nm~334.7 nm were obtained by controlling deposition time. After deposition, the thin-film resistors were annealed at 400 °C under different durations in N2 atmosphere using the rapid thermal annealing (RTA) process. The sheet resistance of NiCrSi thin-film resistors was measured using the four-point-probe method from 25 °C to 125 °C, then the temperature coefficient of resistance could be obtained. We aim to show that resistivity of NiCrSi thin-film resistors decreased with increasing deposition time (thickness) and the annealing process had apparent effect on the sheet resistance and temperature coefficient of resistance. We also aim to show that the annealed NiCrSi thin-film resistors had a low temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) between 0 ppm/°C and +50 ppm/°C.

At first, Cr-Si (28 wt% Cr, 72 wt% Si) and Ni-Cr (80 wt% Ni, 20 wt% Cr) thin-film materials were deposited by using sputtering method at the same parameters, and their physical and electrical properties were investigated. The resistances of Cr-Si and Ni-Cr thin-film resistors decreased with the increase of deposition time (thickness) and their resistivity had no apparent variations as the deposition time increased. The temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) of single-layer Cr-Si thin-film resistors was negative and the TCR value of single-layer Ni-Cr thin-film resistors was positive. For that, we used Cr-Si thin films as upper (or lower) layer and Ni-Cr thin films as lower (upper) layer to investigate a bi-layer thin-film structure. The deposition time of Ni-Cr thin films was fixed at 10 min and the deposition time of Cr-Si thin films was changed from 10 min to 60 min. We had found that as Cr-Si thin films were used as upper or lower layers they had similar deposition rates. We had also found that the thickness and stack method of Cr-Si thin films had large effects on the resistance and TCR values of the bi-layer thin-film resistors.