Reducing the contact resistance of SiNW devices by employing a heavily doped carrier injection layer.

Silicon nanowires (SiNWs) are promising building blocks for future electronic devices. In SiNW-based devices, reducing the contact resistance of SiNW-metal as much as possible is critically important. Here we report a simple fabrication approach for SiNW field effect transistors (FETs) with low contact resistances by employing a heavily doped carrier injection layer wrapped around SiNWs at the contact region. Both n- and p-type SiNW-FET devices with carrier injection layers were investigated, the contact resistances were one order smaller than those without carrier injection layers and only contribute less than 14.8% for n-type devices and 11.4% for p-type devices, respectively, to the total resistance. Such low contact resistance guarantees the device characteristics mainly from the channel region of SiNW-based devices.