Erratum: "Suppressed diffusion of boron and carbon in carbon-rich silicon" [Appl.

The electrochemical capacitance-voltage (ECV) technique was used to measure the carrier concentration profiles in St. Using the conventional parallel-equivalent circuit model of the Schottky junction to describe the electrolyte-silicon barrier we found excellent agreement between ECV and four-point probe analyses within +_10 to 20% for bulk Si uniformly doped p-and n-type from 1012 to 1018 cm -~. In this concentration range accuracy limits are determined mainly by the precise measurement of the area of the electrolyte-St contact. For the anodic etching of St, a constant effective dissolution valence of z = 3.7 was used throughout the measurements. Investigations with isotype and anisotype doping transitions were performed employing ECV and other profiling techniques for comparison.

No abstract

We investigated in detail the strain relaxation behaviour of metastable tensile-strained Si 1−y C y epilayers on Si(001) by comparing the layers before and after an annealing step using a variety of different diagnostic methods. The dominant strain-relieving mechanism is the formation of carbon-containing interstitial complexes and/or silicon carbide nanoparticles, similar to the behaviour of carbon in silicon under thermodynamical equilibrium conditions (concentrations below the solid bulk solubility limit). We did not observe any carbon out-diffusion. To grow material suitable for device applications, all carbon atoms should be incorporated substitutionally. There is only a very narrow temperature window for perfect epitaxial growth of such layers, limited on one side by the possible formation of interstitial carbon complexes and on the other side by the deterioration of epitaxial growth at low temperatures. The carbon concentration should not exceed a few per cent to avoid strain-driven precipitation.