摘要： The deposition of a metal onto a semiconductor surface to provide low contact resistance, high-reliability electrical contacts without adversely affecting the device during the metallization process is one of the most important challenges in device fabrication. Consequently, a fundamental understanding of how contacts work is essential for successful device manufacturing and commercialization. The physics of carrier transport across the metal-semiconductor junction renders metal contacts either rectifying (a.k.a. Schottky) or nonrectifying. A nonrectifying contact whose relationship between current and voltage has a low interfacial contact resistance Rc, and is preferably linear, is referred to as an Ohmic contact. Achieving low contact resistance Rc (Ω mm) or contact resistivity ρc (Ω cm2) has required a great amount of investigation for every relevant semiconductor material in the past. Typically, the successful formation of an Ohmic contact has relied on three constituent requirements: highly or degenerately doped semiconductor, choice of metallization, and thermal annealing. In the case of silicon, for instance, diffusion processes have been the topic of much early work but ultimately the control and reproducibility of ion implantation have rendered it an industry standard. For compound semiconductor heterostructure devices based on GaAs or GaN, the presence of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) has necessitated a multilayer metallization deposition and annealing scheme, the details of which took many years to optimize. Particularly in the case of III-nitride high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), Ohmic contacts were relatively easy to make on heteroepitaxal GaN due to its high dislocation density as the barrier height was reduced through defect-assisted formation of metal-nitride alloys during the anneal. Subsequent breakthroughs in GaN crystal growth, however, resulted in several orders of magnitude lower dislocation density homoepitaxial GaN, and naturally the contact resistance obtained under identical process conditions was higher [1]. Regrowth techniques to provide n+-doped GaN have become commonplace as a result.