A simple fitting procedure is presented for the analysis of the strain
profile in semiconductors; it has been applied to samples of ion-impl
anted silicon. The calculated strain profiles for some experimental ro
cking curves are compared with the simulated dopant-concentration prof
iles and the energy profiles. A two-sided Gaussian has been shown to p
roduce an adequate fit to the strain profile in ion-implanted semicond
uctors. This procedure reduces the number of refinable parameters to o
nly four and is favoured over changing the strain distribution as a fu
nction of depth in a rapid uncorrelated way. The error between the mea
sured and calculated rocking curves has been analysed as a function of
the Gaussian parameters. Besides one sharp global minimum, many local
minima exist. It is shown that smoothing of the rocking curves with a
triangular shape results in a reduction of the number of local minima
.