Abstract
HgCdTe material intended for long-wavelength infrared detection is particularly susceptible to damage from stress. As a result, an ideal ohmic contact needs to have good adhesion and low specific contact resistance. The contact should act as a diffusion barrier and induce the least amount of stress in the underlying material. In this paper we present a set of stress measurements from different ohmic contact materials deposited on short- and long-wavelength HgCdTe films grown by liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE). Using a new experimental technique we remove the substrate and measure the stress induced on single- and multilayered HgCdTe cantilevers. To interpret our results, we develop a theoretical model that describes the physics of elastic deformation in HgCdTe layers. Our model is based on classical thin-plate bending theory and explicitly takes into account the realistic boundary conditions that are present in the experimental setup by using a variational approach.
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D’Orsogna, D., Lamarre, P., Bellotti, E. et al. A Novel Stress Characterization Technique for the Development of Low-Stress Ohmic Contacts to HgCdTe. J. Electron. Mater. 38, 1698–1706 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-009-0790-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-009-0790-7