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For iron detection in silicon, minority carrier diffusion length measurements are often used. These methods analyze only the bulk properties of the wafer and therefore failed in the case of epitaxial wafers due to the disturbing influence of the highly doped substrate. A technique is presented for the determination of the iron content in epitaxial as well as in polished wafers using generation lifetime measurements on metal-oxide-silicon capacitors. The influence of interstitial iron and iron-boron pairs on generation lifetime was investigated for samples diffused with iron in boron-doped silicon. The difference in reciprocal generation lifetime before and after a thermal anneal of 200 °C for three minutes was calibrated using deep level transient spectroscopy to detect the iron-boron pair concentration. For a typical metal-oxide-silicon capacitor fabrication process this means a detectability limit for iron-boron concentrations of about 8×1010 at/cm3. The advantage of this method is that it detects iron in a surface near region in contrast to the often used diffusion length measurements. This gives us the opportunity of controlling the iron content in epitaxial wafers as well as in wafers after an internal gettering process. In addition, the iron-boron pairing reaction was investigated in the temperature range between 21 and 50 °C. The activation energy for this reaction was determined to be 0.70 eV.

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