The influence of the thickness of electrodes on constriction resistance in nanofabricated sample for physical simulating of the electrical contacts

Abstract

Contact resistance of electrical contact in connectors consists of film resistance which is caused by high resistivity material such as oxidized metal or contamination and constriction resistance that result from narrowing current. About the latter, to establish a relationship between the physical structure of electrical contact boundary and the resistance in actual consumer connectors, we fabricate samples that represented the contact-simulated structure via nanofabrication and measure their constriction resistance. By comparing those measurement results with theoretical values, we have reported the validation of this technique. Constriction resistance is dependent on the size and/or shape of contact point. In addition to contact resistance, the thickness of the electrodes is important factor for real connectors. We measured the resistance of samples which have varying thickness of the metal layer assuming electrodes to know the influence of the thickness of electrodes on constriction resistance. Consequently, it is obtained that constriction resistance and contact area size are correlating and the constriction resistance converges in the case that the thickness of the electrodes is more than about ten times of the diameter of contact area.