One of the ways in which a semiconductor material is characterized is by measurement of its resistivity. In the development of silicon carbide (SiC) for use as a semiconductor material for high temperature applications, it became necessary to measure the resistivity of the thin SiC film while it was still attached to the silicon upon which it had been grown epitaxially. The problem is that the presence of the silicon substrate will introduce error in the measured resistivity of the SiC. This program assumes that the resistivity of a thin film of conducting material deposited on another layer of conducting material is measured using the four-point probe. Using the four-point probe measurements, this program calculates the "true" resistivity of the deposited layer on a substrate of finite and different resistivity.

Starting from basic principles, an expression for the ratio of measured voltage difference to injected current is developed. This expression involves the probe spacing, relative thicknesses of the layers, and the substrate resistivity as parameters, as well as the unknown resistivity of the deposited layer. The unknown resistivity can be found by iteratively evaluating the theoretical expression. This must be done numerically.