Electrical activation, annealing

Activation, electrical, annealing, ion-implanted integrated circuits, 138... 

Pulsed laser or electron beam offer a unique method to deposit a large amount of energy into the first few microns of the irradiated material so rapidly that the bulk temperature is not affected. This method was applied initially to anneal the damage in ion implanted semiconductors [1] and to activate electrically the... 

Figure 16-41. Electrical characteristics lor single-layer ITO/Oocl-OI V.VAI devices with an as-deposited (O) or annealed (I20"C, 5 min 0) active layer. Inset luminance as a function of cell current for both thin-filin morphologies.

Some of the major questions that semiconductor characterization techniques aim to address are the concentration and mobility of carriers and their level of compensation, the chemical nature and local structure of electrically-active dopants and their energy separations from the VB or CB, the existence of polytypes, the overall crystalline quality or perfection, the existence of stacking faults or dislocations, and the effects of annealing upon activation of electrically-active dopants. For semiconductor alloys, that are extensively used to tailor optoelectronic properties such as the wavelength of light emission, the question of whether the solid-solutions are ideal or exhibit preferential clustering of component atoms is important. The next... 

Copper and nickel are also common contaminants in Si and can often be introduced during annealing treatments. Both of these impurities are extremely rapid diffusers and cannot be retained in electrically active form even by rapid quenching of diffused samples (Weber, 1983). Quite often, complexes involving Cu or Fe impurities are observed by DLTS in heat-treated Si. All of these centers are hole traps, with Cu giving rise to levels at Ev + 0.20 eV, Ev + 0.35 eV and Ev + 0.53 eV, whereas Ni is related to levels at Ev + 0.18 eV, Ev + 0.21 eV and Ev + 0.33 eV. All of these levels are passivated by reaction with atomic hydrogen (Pearton and Tavendale, 1983), and are restored by annealing at 400°C. 

Fig. 5. Capacitance and current transient spectra from -type, CZ grown Si annealed for 18h at 450°C to form the shallow, oxygen thermal donors. (Chantre et al., 1987). Hydrogenation at 200°C passivates the electrical activity of these thermal donors (Chantre et at, 1987).

A wide variety of process-induced defects in Si are passivated by reaction with atomic hydrogen. Examples of process steps in which electrically active defects may be introduced include reactive ion etching (RIE), sputter etching, laser annealing, ion implantation, thermal quenching and any form of irradiation with photons or particles wih energies above the threshold value for atomic displacement. In this section we will discuss the interaction of atomic hydrogen with the various defects introduced by these procedures. 

An example of the ability of atomic hydrogen to passivate the electrically active damage created by Ar2+ ion beam (6 keV) bombardment of n-type (N = 1.5 x 1016 cm-3) Ge is shown in Fig. 8. In this case the Ge was sputter etched for 10 min. at 24°C or 100°C and the spectrum recorded using an evaporated Au Schottky contact. The damage created by the sputtering caused the rather broad peak of Fig. 8(i), which was unaffected by a 30 min. anneal at 200°C in molecular hydrogen. Heating in atomic... 

Recent studies of doped a-Si H have found that the background density of localized states, that is, the electrically active dopants and dangling bond defects, are metastable (Ast and Brodsky, 1979 Street et al., 1986, 1987a Muller et al., 1986). After annealing above 150°C in the dark, the dark conductivity at room temperature of n- and p-type doped a-Si H decreases by nearly a factor of two over a time scale of several weeks for n-type and several hours for p-type a-Si H. As shown in Fig. 9 (Street et al., 1987a), the relaxation rate of the occupied band tail density nBT is a sensitive function of temperature, so that the time to reach... 

In MBE grown GaAs three dominant electron traps are usually observed Ml at c - 0.17 eV, M3 at c - 0.28 eV and M4 at c - 0.45 eV. Exposure of MBE grown material to a hydrogen plasma for 30 minutes at 250°C completely passivates these three deep levels as shown in Fig. 10 (Dautremont-Smith et al., 1986). After five minute anneals at 400°C or 500°C, the passivation remains complete while the shallow donors are fully reactivated. A five minute annealing at 600°C partially restores the electrical activity of M3. Therefore the thermal stability of the neutralization of deep levels in MBE material is much higher than in other materials and is compatible with most technological treatments. 

In this chapter, we review the current status of doping of SiC by ion implantation. Section 4.2 examines as-implanted depth profiles with respect to the influence of channeling, ion mass, ion energy, implantation temperature, fluence, flux, and SiC-polytype. Experiments and simulations are compared and the validity of different simulation codes is discussed. Section 4.3 deals with postimplant annealing and reviews different annealing concepts. The influence of diffusion (equilibrium and nonequilibrium) on dopant profiles is discussed, as well as a comprehensive review of defect evolution and electrical activation. Section 4.4 offers conclusions and discusses technology barriers and suggestions for future work. 

Making comparisons between literature data using different measurement techniques is therefore many times not possible. In addition, there is the problem with surface decomposition at higher annealing temperatures, discussed in Section 4.3.1, that may strongly affect the formation and reproducibility of electrical contacts produced on implanted and annealed material. In this section we will nevertheless try to evaluate and compare recent achievements in this important field and describe a selected number of recent results on activation studies on both donors and acceptors. 

That the effective hole masses, or the density of states, is a complicated matter in SiC is well described in a review by Gardner et al. [118]. This article treats in some detail the valence band and estimates the contribution from the three top-most bands to the density of states, including the temperature dependence. Using the estimated effective mass the authors attempt to calculate the activation (i.e., the ratio of implanted and electrically active Al ions), and they achieve an activation of 37% of the implanted Al concentration of 10 cm after an anneal at 1,670°C for about 10 minutes. 

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