Oxygen '96

Early Stages of Oxygen Precipitation in Silicon

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LOW TEMPERATURE DIFFUSION AND AGGLOMERATION OF OXYGEN IN SILICON

U. Gösele and E. Schroer

Max-Planck-Institute of Microstructure Physics Weinberg 2, D-06120 Halle, Germany

In the last couple of years detailed experimental information on the formation of thermal donors has become available which is so specific and unusual that at first sight understanding the basic processes of thermal donor formation should have been a straighforward task. Contrary to expectations, this has not been the case. The present contribution will try to combine knowledge from actually observed enhanced long-range diffusion of oxygen with features from thermal donor kinetics to arrive at a set of likely conclusions concerning low-temperature oxygen diffusion as well as thermal donor formation and decay. Special emphasis will be placed on the question of the generation of self-interstitials and the possible processes rendering thermal donors electrically inactive.

In a final part, not associated with low temperatures, results on oxygen precipitation at silicon grain boundaries (fabricated by using wafer bonding techniques) will be presented which show that the precipitates all grow to one defined size. This unusual observation can be explained in terms of a balance between the oxide/silicon interface energy, grain boundary energy and a ledge energy of the facetted oxide precipitates.

Last modified: Wed Feb 28 19:00:13 GMT 1996 JG