Structural, Elemental, and Chemical Complex Defects in Silicon and Their Impact on Silicon Devices

摘要

Silicon materials science is largely an area of knowledge about defects-silicon native defects (self-interstitials and vacancies), intentionally introduced impurities (shallow dopants), and unintentional contaminants (oxygen, carbon, transition metals). This review provides a brief summary of the current understanding of the origin of defects and their impact in silicon. The inherent difficulty in understanding the properties and mechanisms of the formation of each particular defect is that a silicon wafer is a complicated structure in which native defects, dopants, unintentional impurities, and structural defects all interact with each other and affect each other in a variety of ways. These complex interactions are sketched in Fig. 1. The circle in the middle of the figure represents the interactions between the defects. It is difficult or impossible to fully understand one defect without understanding the complex defect environment in which it exists in a wafer; on the other hand, understanding the properties of one type of defect helps in understanding the others. The examples presented below show how one type of defect can be engineered or understood through the control over the other types of defects.