Nickel: A very fast diffuser in silicon

Nickel is increasingly used in both IC and photovoltaic device fabrication, yet it has the potential to create highly recombination-active precipitates in silicon. For nearly three decades, the accepted nickel diffusivity in silicon has been DNi(T)=2.3×10exp−3 exp(−0.47 eV/kBT) cm2/s, a surprisingly low value given reports of rapid nickel diffusion in industrial applications. In this paper, we employ modern experimental methods to measure the higher nickel diffusivity DNi(T)=(1.69±0.74)×10exp−4 exp(−0.15±0.04 eV/kBT)  cm2/s. The measured activation energy is close to that predicted by first-principles theory using the nudged-elastic-band method. Our measured diffusivity of nickel is higher than previously published values at temperatures below 1150 °C, and orders of magnitude higher when extrapolated to room temperature.Peer reviewe

NEW MATERIALS FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS AND OPTOELECTRONICS BASED ON SILICON WITH BINARY NANOCLUSTERS OF IMPURITY ATOMS WITH CONTROLLABLE PARAMETERS

The original technical solution is proposed that allows control the fundamental parameters of silicon by forming binary unit cells Si2AIIIBV. It is shown that the silicon with binary nanoclusters is a new semiconductor material with unique functional capabilities that allows completely replacing III – V semiconductor compound