Abstract: The forward current--voltage (I--V) characteristics of polycrystalline CoSi₂/n-Si(100) Schottky contacts have been measured in a wide temperature range. At low temperatures (≤200K), a plateau-like section is observed in the I--V characteristics around 10^-4A·cm^-2. The current in the small bias region significantly exceeds that expected by the model based on thermionic emission (TE) and a Gaussian distribution of Schottky barrier height (SBH). Such a double threshold behaviour can be explained by the barrier height inhomogeneity, i.e. at low temperatures the current through some patches with low SBH dominates at small bias region. With increasing bias voltage, the Ohmic effect becomes important and the current through the whole junction area exceeds the patch current, thus resulting in a plateau-like section in the I--V curves at moderate bias. For the polycrystalline CoSi₂/Si contacts studied in this paper, the apparent ideality factor of the patch current is much larger than that calculated from the TE model taking the pinch-off effect into account. This suggests that the current flowing through these patches is of the tunnelling type, rather than the thermionic emission type. The experimental I--V characteristics can be fitted reasonably well in the whole temperature region using the model based on tunnelling and pinch-off.

Key words: Schottky barrier height, metal－semiconductor contact, inhomogeneity