Development and analysis of procedures for the measurement of electrical properties of thin insulator layers

This paper describes a measurement system for the characterization of the electrical properties of thin insulator layers. Such layers are typical of metal oxide metal (MOM) devices which can be produced by means of plasma sputtering and that permit the realization of a large set of high performance components (capacitors, active devices, sensors,...). The electrical properties of the oxide layers, which have thickness down to 100 nm, are difficult to be measured since very high resistances of tens gigaohms and small capacitances of few picofarads are expected in the case of sample dimension of few square millimeters. The measurement system and the procedures described in this paper represent a possible solution for this kind of measurements and can be used to characterize not only the electrical properties of a single point, but also the uniformity and repeatability of the coating process on larger samples.