Formation and specific contact resistivity of NiGe on polycrystalline Ge made by flash lamp annealing

Flash lamp annealing (FLA) is an ultra-short annealing method, which excellently meets the requirements of thin-film processing and microelectronics. Due to the relatively high hole mobility, thin Ge layers are highly interesting as a transistor channel material or generally as a functional layer in CMOS technology and for low-cost electronics. One possibility to realize ohmic contacts with low contact resistance is the use of metal germanides, especially the stoichiometric NiGe phase. In this work, NiGe contacts on thin Ge films were fabricated by magnetron sputtering followed by FLA. The evolution of microstructure was traced by transmission electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction. Electrical measurements focused on the determination of contact resistance by the circular transfer length method. The contacts were fabricated by two different approaches, and the influence of different process steps on the layer morphology and uncertainty of the measurement was studied. Finally, we show that FLA as a thermal treatment with a low thermal budget is able to form NiGe on p-type Ge with a low contact resistance similar to that achieved by other thermal treatments.