TY - JOUR
T1 - Carrier recombination lifetime measurement in silicon epitaxial layers using optically excited MOS capacitor technique
AU - Elhami Khorasani, Arash
AU - Schroder, Dieter K.
AU - Alford, Terry
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. We are indebted to Martin Fikáček and Jiří Skuhrovec (Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) for revision of the manuscripst and usefull comments. Ondřej Abonyi (Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) kindly revised the English. The presented study was supported by the Charles University Grant Agency (GAUK 119 209) and by the grant of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic (MŠMT ČR - 0021620828).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1963-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2015/5/1
Y1 - 2015/5/1
N2 - Carrier recombination lifetime is a key semiconductor parameter that not only has a major role in how a variety of solid-state devices operate, but one that can also be used as a process cleanliness monitoring tool. Lifetime measurement on epitaxial wafers, where the epilayer thickness is smaller than the minority carrier's diffusion length, has always been a challenging task. Although the pulsed MOS capacitor has been shown to be an eminently suitable technique for measuring the generation lifetime (τg) on these wafers, measuring the recombination lifetime (τr ) yet has remained complicated and difficult to implement. In this paper, a new technique for accurate measurement of τr will be presented. Lifetime will be extracted from the capacitance transient (C- t ) of an inverted MOS device while being excited by an optical pulse. In addition to its easy implementation, the recombination lifetime extracted this way is least affected by Si/SiO2 surface and epi/substrate interface effects when compared with older techniques such as the photoconductance decay. TCAD simulations and experimental results will be presented to demonstrate the promising application of the optically excited MOS to the characterization of p/p+ silicon epitaxial layers.
AB - Carrier recombination lifetime is a key semiconductor parameter that not only has a major role in how a variety of solid-state devices operate, but one that can also be used as a process cleanliness monitoring tool. Lifetime measurement on epitaxial wafers, where the epilayer thickness is smaller than the minority carrier's diffusion length, has always been a challenging task. Although the pulsed MOS capacitor has been shown to be an eminently suitable technique for measuring the generation lifetime (τg) on these wafers, measuring the recombination lifetime (τr ) yet has remained complicated and difficult to implement. In this paper, a new technique for accurate measurement of τr will be presented. Lifetime will be extracted from the capacitance transient (C- t ) of an inverted MOS device while being excited by an optical pulse. In addition to its easy implementation, the recombination lifetime extracted this way is least affected by Si/SiO2 surface and epi/substrate interface effects when compared with older techniques such as the photoconductance decay. TCAD simulations and experimental results will be presented to demonstrate the promising application of the optically excited MOS to the characterization of p/p+ silicon epitaxial layers.
KW - Epitaxial layers
KW - MOS capacitor
KW - metallic contamination
KW - recombination lifetime
KW - semiconductor defects
KW - semiconductor device measurements
KW - semiconductor materials
KW - silicon.
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U2 - 10.1109/TED.2015.2409291
DO - 10.1109/TED.2015.2409291
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85028224998
SN - 0018-9383
VL - 62
SP - 1553
EP - 1560
JO - IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
JF - IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
IS - 5
M1 - 7067362
ER -