Nickel and gold identification in p-type silicon through TDLS: a modeling study

Abstract

In Silicon, impurities introduce recombination centers and degrade the minority carrier lifetime. It is therefore important to identify the nature of these impurities through their characteristics: the capture cross section σ and the defect level Et. For this purpose, a study of the bulk lifetime of minority carriers can be carried out. The temperature dependence of the lifetime based on the Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) statistic and related to recombination through defects is studied. Nickel and gold in p-type Si have been selected for the SRH lifetime modeling. The objective of the analysis is to carry out a study to evaluate gold and nickel identification prior to temperature-dependent lifetime measurements using the microwave phase-shift (μW-PS) technique. The μW-PS is derived from the PCD technique and is sensitive to lower impurity concentrations. It has been shown that both gold and nickel can be unambiguously identified from the calculated TDLS curves.