With the downscaling of MOSFETs the relative importance of access resistances on transistor behavior and thus on integrated circuits performance significantly increases. Several DC and Radio Frequency characterization techniques have been proposed in the literature to extract the access resistances. It has been demonstrated that the mobility degradation with the vertical electric field in advanced MOSFETs and the transistor asymmetry might strongly degrade the accuracy of the extracted resistance values. Based on simulation and experimental results, correction factors are proposed and guidelines are drawn to help the user for choosing the right extrinsic resistance extraction methodology depending on a few figures of merit associated to the measured data of the FET device. Based on our conclusions, a robust characterization method for deep-submicron devices is proposed and successfully applied to FinFETs. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.