Resolving In Situ Specific‐Contact, Current‐Crowding, and Channel Resistivity in Nanowire Devices: A Case Study with Silver Nanowires

Abstract

Resistance contributions in a nanowire device are determined accurately. Resistance in silver nanowires, such as conduction‐channel and contact resistance, including current‐crowding effects, reveal both the true nanowire resistivity and the overall device performance, including dissipation and scaling potential. A comprehensive study on the device layout, the contact geometry and, most importantly, the transfer length over which charge injection between contact electrode and nanowire occurs, is performed.

Contact resistivity and suppression of Fermi level pinning in side-contacted germanium nanowires

“…Furthermore, the active conduction-channel and gate-length in the NW devices was found to extend below the full contact-electrode. The findings are in agreement with our earlier study on metallic NWs, 23 demonstrating a general trend in quasi-1D nanomaterials. …”

“…19 Typical NW resistances were of the order of several MX up the GX range. R lead measured in short-circuited structures were less than 1 kX, and R geom evaluated from a lateral current crowding model for cylindrical NWs introduced in an earlier work of ours 23 was found to be two orders of magnitude smaller than R C and R NW . 19 The specific contact resistivity, q C ¼ R C A C , of the metal-electrode/NW interface was calculated within the Transmission Line Model 22 using the interface area A C ¼ pbdD for b $ 0.5-0.75 corresponding to the fraction of NW circumference covered with electrode metal.…”

Impact of surface and twin-boundary scattering on the electrical transport properties of Ag nanowires

“…Apart from edge dislocations along the twin boundaries, structural analysis showed no presence of major concentrations of defects within the nanowire. The results of the our TEM analysis are in agreement with numerous previous structural studies on Ag [7][8][9][10] and other metallic types of synthetic NWs [11,12]. Sub-100 nm metallic fcc NWs have been found to have negligible defects [8,9,11,12].…”

“…The results of the our TEM analysis are in agreement with numerous previous structural studies on Ag [7][8][9][10] and other metallic types of synthetic NWs [11,12]. Sub-100 nm metallic fcc NWs have been found to have negligible defects [8,9,11,12]. Due to the elastic strain, stacking faults and dislocations tend to segregate at the twin boundaries especially at the core area; however these defects propagate along the whole longitudinal axis of the NWs [7][8][9][10].…”

“…Several synthetic methods are established [5][6][7] which allow high-yield production of single-crystalline NWs with controllable diameter sizes and negligible amount of defects and impurities. It has been demonstrated that metallic NWs have pentagonal cross-sections with five-fold twin longitudinal boundaries [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] due to preferential surface and strain energetics [9][10][11].…”