Activation and Dissociation of Proton-Induced Donor Profiles in Silicon

Abstract

The impact of the thermal budget on the introduction and dissociation of hydrogen-related donor profiles in high purity silicon implanted with protons in the energy range of MeV is investigated. The hydrogen-related donors are radiation-induced defect complexes decorated by the implanted hydrogen. The appearance of the donor profiles is limited to the annealing temperature regime between about 350 °C and 500 °C. The activation of the doping profiles is limited by the diffusion of the implanted hydrogen from the end-of-range region throughout the radiation-induced damage profile. This formation process is adequately described by a diffusion model with an effective activation energy of 1.2 eV. The thermal stability of the hydrogen-related donor profiles is limited by the dissociation of the donors. The deactivation of the doping is modeled by two hydrogen-related donor species with effective dissociation energies of 2.6 eV and 3 eV. The formation and dissociation mechanisms described in the present study define the upper and lower limits of the post-implantation thermal budget, respectively, for a sensible use of proton implantation doping in crystalline silicon.

Hydrogen decoration of radiation damage induced defect structures

“…The slope of the lines yield the activation energies and the intercepts yield the prefactors D 0 . To increase the reliability of the extracted activation energy and prefactors D 0 , additional data points were added from a very recent study from Laven et al [6] In literature, the reported diffusion coefficients of hydrogen in silicon vary over several orders of magnitude from 10 -5 to 10 -13 cm²s -1 . Activation energies of hydrogen in silicon, extracted by experimental measurements, are reported from 0.48 eV [8] to 1.2 eV [9][10][11].…”

High dose proton implantations into silicon: a combined EBIC, SRP and TEM study

“…H + implantations in the dose range of 10 13 -10 15 H + /cm² and anneals in the temperature range from 350 °C to 550 °C are used to form H-related thermal donor complexes [2,11]. The concentration and type of these thermal donors strongly depend on the annealing temperature and annealing time [12][13][14][15][16] the formation and dissociation process of these donor complexes was investigated in various studies using deep level transient spectroscopy [17], infra-red spectroscopy [18], electron paramagnetic resonance [19] and spreading resistance profiling [20]. One important application of H + implantation doping is as a field stop of an Isolated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) [8].…”

Depletion of superjunction power MOSFETs visualized by electron beam induced current and voltage contrast measurements

“…Alternative fabrication methods have been tested, where the formation of ntype columns was realized via the implantation of hydrogen ions [4,5]. Although the formation of deep doping profiles due to the implantation of hydrogen [6] is a very useful method, this process is not used because the formation/dissociation [7] and diffusion processes [8] of the hydrogen-related thermal donors are still not well understood and may lead to reliability issues. …”