Low resistance epitaxial edge contacts to buried nanometer thick conductive layers of BaSnO3

Abstract

As the size of the semiconductor device decreases, the importance of the low resistance contacts to devices cannot be overstated. Here, we studied the contact resistance to buried nanometer thick δ-doped Ba1-xLaxSnO3 (BLSO) layers. We have used epitaxial 4% (x = 0.04) BLSO as a contact material, which has additional advantages of forming Ohmic contacts to BaSnO3 and providing thermal stability even at high temperatures. The contact resistance was measured by a modified transmission line method designed to eliminate the contribution from the resistance of the contact material. The upper bound for the contact resistance to a 12 nm thick δ-doped 1% BLSO conductive layer was measured to be 1.25 × 10−1or 2.87 × 10−7 Ω cm2. Our results show that it is possible to provide low resistance epitaxial edge contacts to an embedded nanometer-thick BLSO conductive layer using an ion-milling process. Our low resistance contact method can be easily extended to a two-dimensional electron gas at the oxide interfaces such as LaInO3/BaSnO3.