Nichrome Thin Film Technology and its Application

Abstract

NiCr thin film resistors are widely used in the current resistor technology. Ranging from discrete resistors up to highest performance hybrid integrated circuits, vacuum deposited NiCr alloys cover extreme areas of application. Depending upon NiCr composition, process parameters, substrate and conductor materials, resistors with extremely low temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) and high stability, low noise and distortion can be produced. NiCr resistors therefore offer particular advantages for applications with special demand for high stability as well as low TCR-like selected circuits for measuring equipment, data processing, telecommunication, etc.

Effect of Cr content on mechanical and electrical properties of Ni–Cr thin films

“…NiCr inherited its high resistivity from the transition metals in its composition and has found applicability in electricelectronic industry as a resistor material. Bulk resistivity of NiCr is about 110 cm [2]. Among other high resistance materials, NiCr has good stability, adhesion and low thermal coefficient of resistivity [3,4].…”

Electrical properties of RF sputtered NiCr thin film resistors with Cu contacts

“…The nature of the characteristics reveal that the Cu Freshly deposited NiCr films shows a tendency for self annealing. 8 This results in changes in resistance and TCR of the film. It is therefore necessary to stabilize the film properties.…”

“…Numerous publications on different aspects of resistor fabrication and characterization have appeared in the literature during the past fifteen years. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Conventionally a multilayer Ti-Pd-Au conductor system is used as the contact metallization for NiCr resistors. 11 In recent years due to increased cost of the precious metals a need for a low cost replacement metallization for the expensive Ti-Pd-Au has been realized.…”

Bulk property of 1/f noise for piezoresistive Ni/Cr thin films in pressure sensors on flexible substrate

“…In our earlier works (Ahmed et al 2011;Ahmed et al 2012), we investigated the sensing properties of relative and absolute pressure sensors fabricate on flexible substrates and utilizing nichrome (Ni-80/Cr-20 %) piezoresistors. Nichrome was used as a sensing material due to its low temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) (0.0085 %/K) and reasonable gauge factor (Rolke 1981). Flicker noise or 1/f noise of piezoresistive semiconductor has been studied extensively (Barlian et al 2009) and found to be one the limiting factors to achieve higher sensitivity of microsystems.…”