This thesis studies the two most common transition metals in silicon – copper and iron. The purpose of the experiments and theoretical calculations presented in this thesis is to increase the current knowledge of the precipitation behavior of these metals under different processing conditions. The study also includes the development of recombination lifetime methods for impurity characterization in silicon.
A method to measure trace copper contamination in silicon using the microwave photoconductivity decay is proposed. The method is based on the observation that copper precipitates can be created using light activation. It is shown that external charge on wafer surfaces can reduce the copper out-diffusion, which extends the applicability of the method. Moreover, oxide precipitates are found to increase the sensitivity of the method.
An analytical solution to the current continuity equation for excess carriers in an epitaxial structure under time dependent optical excitation is derived. In addition, some analytical approximations are developed and numerical calculations are made to check their accuracy. The built-in potential between the epitaxial layer and the substrate is taken into account and also the light induced barrier lowering is included in the model. The barrier lowering is found to be noticeable and can affect the effective lifetime by up to two orders of magnitude.
Several annealing profiles and contamination levels are used to study the iron gettering behavior at varying supersaturation levels. It was found that the gettering efficiency depends strongly on the initial iron concentration and considerably high supersaturation is needed to initiate the gettering. The results are discussed from the perspective of thermodynamics.
The thermal stability of internally gettered iron is studied experimentally by deep level transient spectroscopy. The experiments reveal that the dissolution is a reaction limited process. The simulations of iron re-dissolution show that instead of simulating only the final cooling, it is important to simulate the whole thermal cycle. This is important since low thermal budgets are becoming more and more common in the IC technology.reviewe
