MEASUREMENT OF THE ELECTRICAL-PROPERTIES OF ELECTROMIGRATION SPECIMENS

A description is given of the design, implementation, and performance of a circuit to measure the electrical properties of resistive specimens of about 10 Omega such as are used in electromigration studies. The ac bridge can measure the changes in resistance, second-harmonic amplitude, second-harmonic phase shift, thermal noise, and excess (1/f) electrical noise. All the parameters can be monitored simultaneously and continuously. The performance is comparable with that of systems designed to measure each of the quantities only. The special features are that it is an autobalance bridge so that chan es in the measured quantities are recorded by the feedback signal, the spectrum analyzer is not overloaded, and the recovery of the noise signal is performed by software. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.